In article om, "Dee D.
Flint" writes:

"D. Stussy" wrote in message
.org...
On Wed, 10 Dec 2003, N2EY wrote:
"Bill Sohl" wrote in message
hlink.net...
The calendar year 2004 has a considerable
amount of expirations...well above a normal
distribution which would have been about 1/10th
of existing hams...or about 63K.

Don't you mean "about 68K", Bill?

More like 73K....

The actual future expiratons data from the Joe
Speroni web site is over 84K expirations
with two months showing very high numbers...
almost 11K in May and over 17K in July.

Didn't FCC change the vanity call rules right about then? If so, it
would explain the spike because getting a vanity call causes an
automatic renewal regardless of the 90 day rule (so FCC doesn't have
to pro-rate the fee, IIUC)

That's going to be the 2006 problem.

Will be interesting to watch the renewal results.

Yep!

Further clouded by the 90 days before/2 years after rules. If someone
is a little late renewing, they show up as an expiration.

What's more interesting is the count of those whose licenses expire
WITHOUT them
also having expired (i.e. those who DON'T renew, as opposed to those who
can't).

Actually if you go to the FCC database and sort for expired licenses, those
that have lapsed but are in the grace period will not show up as expired.
So there is a two year lag between the actual expiration date and when they
are marked as expired in the database.

Very true.

The 683K number quoted above does not include grace priod licenses, though,
only active ones. It also does not include club, military and RACES licenses -
only individuals.

This difference sometimes causes confusion because someone will see a number
that reflects the entire database including grace period licenses, and then see
a later number that does not include grace period licenses. If only 5% of hams
don't renew before the end of the grace period, (2-1/2% per year) that works
out to over 34,000.

73 de Jim, N2EY