Flipping through the numbers over the past few months it is interesting to see the very gradual roll-off on novice and advanced OP's. I can see where advanced licenses will be around much longer. Not just because of the numbers, but if you are an amateur who went through the trouble of going that far you are less likely to give it up.
Agreed! There are some other factors:
1) The difference in privileges between an Advanced and an Extra isn't all that great unless you are interested in certain specific parts of ham radio. What I mean by this is that all the Advanced-to-Extra upgrade gives is some small parts of a couple of HF bands, and a few more choices of vanity call. If an Advanced isn't really interested in those particular things, why bother?
OTOH, a Novice can get a lot more privileges by upgrading to any other license class. I suspect that those Novices who are/were really interested upgraded long ago.
2) As you have probably noticed in other threads, some folks want to hang on to their Advanced for various reasons involving the testing and other factors. (For example, having an Advanced proves you've been a ham since at least April 2000).
3) Also as you have probably noticed in other threads, there are occasional rumors/proposals/shouldas about free no-test upgrades, rules changes, etc.
For example, some years back, QCWA formally proposed to FCC that all Generals and Advanceds who earned those licenses before Nov. 22 1968 should get full privileges and/or a free upgrade to Extra. Of course FCC said no.
I suspect that if there's even a chance of a free upgrade, some hams will put off upgrading in the hopes that it will happen.
I have tried to engage a few of the novices to see if they wanted to upgrade their licenses to pick up more privileges but many say "oh, I have not been on the air for X number of years". I do not know what the success rate would be in bringing these folks up to a general class license.
I would like to see the ARRL do some sort of mass mailing to all of the novice class licensees, informing them of how easy it would be for them to upgrade to general. If we do nothing, many of those numbers will continue to decline.
While the ARRL sends out lots of information to members (every week or two I get another letter from them on this or that) they do very little for the non-members, many of whom have dropped out of the hobby as their licenses gradually expire.
I think the more important question is why those Novices, and other hams of all license classes, are inactive. Particularly after the rules changes of 2000 and 2007 which greatly reduced the license test requirements - particularly the written tests.
I think we need to know the real reasons in order to craft a response.
For example, back in the 1980s and 1990s I saw a lot of folks get ham licenses for personal communications. They'd use the local repeaters for family comms, autopatch, emergencies, etc. Sometimes whole families got licensed at once, with sequential calls.
Some became interested in other aspects of amateur radio, some didn't. Nothing at all wrong with that; 99.99% were good hams and nice people.
But as cell phones became ubiquitous and cheap, many drifted away. The cell did they personal-comms job better most of the time, so it became the default.
I suspect this is one reason we saw a decline in our numbers in the late 1990s.
Another factor is that setting up an amateur radio station (beyond a handheld) can be quite a challenge for a lot of folks due to their living situation.
Novice to General would be an easy argument to make.
Advanced to Extra is filled with too much emotion regarding old breed vs. new breed and should just be left alone.
Novice to General requires passing just two 35 question written tests. Not a big deal, really.
The large number of tech licenses are not a bad thing. It is not as if we do not have enough general, advanced and extra licenses to keep the HF bands alive. I would think that we may see a slight decline over time in tech licenses as some of the the post 9/11 EMCOMM folks do not renew. If that is going to happen it should be visible with a dipping off of tech licenses about a year from now as the 10 year terms are expiring and some of those folks have moved on with other interests.
One reason there are so many Techs is that, after April 15, 2000, the FCC reclassified all Tech Pluses as Tech at renewal. There were almost 130,000 Tech Pluses in early 2000, and the last one disappeared from the current license totals last year.
However, if you look at the combined Tech/Tech Plus numbers, you'll see that the percentage of US hams with those license has decreased a little. At the peak, some years back, their numbers accounted for 49.5% of US hams; now they're down to 49.1%. Meanwhile the percentage of hams with General and Extra has steadily increased.
Soon we will reach the point where fewer than 10% of US hams hold one of the closed-off license classes (Novice or Advanced).
73 de Jim, N2EY
