Of my USA contacts in 2022, about 50% have confirmed on LotW. Of my USA contacts since I started using LotW in 2010 about 53% have confirmed, so Ive not seen much of a change in USA participation in LotW over the years. This year is slightly below average, but then it's not over yet, and not everyone uploads to LotW immediately.
Your 2022 numbers will approach their final percentage by 1 April 2023. There's a very long tail, and so will grow "forever", but almost everyone who will
ever upload will do so by then. That's what my numbers show and I've done things like post-process the LOTW reports, so I have a good idea about the populations that upload quickly. . . and slowly.
Your numbers do seem a little low. I always knew European participation in LOTW was lower than stateside, but I really didn't think it would be that much. That's a surprise, I must admit.
In any case, even your numbers are better than the global-from-the-start-of-time numbers on the LOTW site. That shows only a 21 per cent match rate, which is lower than I have generally achieved any old year. Too pessimistic.
Moreover, in my case (and as far as I can tell, most cases), my LOTW confirmation percentages have crept up year by year (I do track confirmation
dates I get from LOTW). A little SQL gives me:
| Confirmed | Total | Fract. Cfm | Year |
| 2362 | 3846 | 0.614 | 2013 |
| 2395 | 3394 | 0.706 | 2014 |
| 1744 | 2532 | 0.689 | 2015 |
| 1666 | 2509 | 0.664 | 2016 |
| 1753 | 2781 | 0.630 | 2017 |
| 2815 | 3570 | 0.789 | 2018 |
| 3080 | 4162 | 0.740 | 2019 |
| 2977 | 4013 | 0.742 | 2020 |
| 2404 | 3050 | 0.788 | 2021 |
| 789 | 1121 | 0.704 | 2022 |
Of course, 2022 is not done and should go up to at least .75 by the first quarter of next year.
I haven't tested for statistical significance, but the trendline shows an average improvement of about 1.5 per cent a year.
This is consistent with other times I have looked at the data. AC9O's results are likely to look more like mine than yours I think.
Meanwhile, even assuming a mere 50 per cent match rate, a handful of stations still makes one an odds-on favorite to get that confirmation. The probability of a match seems to be statistically independent (borne out by practice, not just assumption).
Given that, then elementary probability suggests the odds of finishing Triple Play are:
50 per cent for one station worked.
87.5 per cent for two stations worked.
95.7 per cent for three stations worked
The math is basic -- you can extrapolate from there. I did have one unlucky station in some prior thread suggest they had worked twelve (!) qualifying calls without a match, so there are problems possible here. But that is very much an outlier and it wasn't clear that the correspondent had waited long enough to see if any of those twelve might still have uploads coming.