Although these raw figures show growth up until 2000, they produce a false
sense of a ham radio as a "healthy hobby".

First - it is not fair to consider 1960 to 2000 - 40 years!! Several
generations of technology have come and gone in that span - hardly an
accurate interval for measuring whether the hobby is "growing" or not. Let's
limit our scope to {roughly} the last decade: 1995 to 2005. These are the
years in which competing technologies - cell phones, computers and the
Internet - have grown by substantial double-digit margins every year while
ham radio remained comparatively stagnant.

- when compared to the global population counts, the percentage licensed
hams in the world versus population has declined.

- looking at the US figures (http://ah0a.org/FCC/Licenses.html) you will see
that US license counts peaked in April of 2003, and are now at a level lower
than they were in June 1997.

- consider the average age of licensed hams (
http://users.crosspaths.net/~wallio/LICENSE.html US figures are available
for comparison... we'll have to extrapolate that other nations are
experiencing a similar trend) the hobby could be seen as being terminally
ill, with very little fresh blood being infused by young hams.

I wish the statistics proved otherwise, but I think your celebration of the
IARU charts is a bit mis-guided.
--
-larry
K8UT
"Caveat Lector" wrote in message
news:BztLd.25649$xt.7545@fed1read07...
Not according to the IARU page at URL:

http://www.iaru.org/statsum00.html

Sez
In 1960 there were 399,000 Amateur stations world wide
In 2000 there were 2,789,720 Amateur stations world wide

I suspect the figures have increased since 2000
--
Caveat Lector