On Jul 27, 6:52?pm, "Dee Flint" wrote:
wrote in message
ups.com...

In any event, at least the steady decline in the ARS license numbers
since 2003 or so seems to have stopped.

There is insufficient
correlation to attribute it to the change in licensing.

Correlation is not causation. Very true, Dee.

For example we are
now probably close to the end of shaking out those who
got licensed as whole
families in the 1990s for family communications around
town. While some
developed further interest in amateur radio, there were
quite a few who have
let their licenses lapse as they went to cell phones or
otherwise had no
further need of that type of communication.

That's certainly possible. Here's another possibility:

I think the distribution of amateur licenses by expiration date
isn't uniform. I suspect this is driven by many factors, one of
which is rules changes for things like vanity callsigns.

Another factor is the long-term trend for older people to be
new hams. Nothing wrong with that at all, but if someone got
their first license in the early 1980s as a retiree, they're pushing
90 now (if they're still with us).

Still another possibility is that the impending rules changes
caused the decline of the past few years, if prospective
hams delayed their entry into amateur radio, waiting for the
rules to change. If you knew that the price of flat-screen
HDTV sets was going to take a nosedive a year from now, you
might hold off on buying one till then.

On top of all that is the fact that, whatever we speculate on the
causes, it's only been 5 months. There's no way to tell if there
is a long-term trend/change at work or not.

73 de Jim, N2EY