On Dec 4, 1:02 am, AF6AY wrote:

Based on the period of 3 March 2007 to 3 December 2007, the US
amateur radio individual licensee totals have changed as follows:

New: 20,901 Expired: 19,739

Compared to an averaged 9 month period prior to 3 March 2007:*

New: 16,957 Expired: 21,822

The total number of individual licensees was 711,175 on 3 Mar 07
and that changed to 711,892 on 3 Dec 07 for a net gain of 717 in
nine months.

The above numbers include licenses which have expired but are in the 2
year grace period. AF6AY is using the term "expired" in a different
way than FCC defines it. Hamdata.com avoids the confusion by using the
phrase "no longer licensed".

That is a 0.1% growth rate.

In short, nothing much has happened to numbers, no significant
changes either way.

IMHO, it is significant that the license numbers were slowly
decreasing from 2003 to 2007, and are now slowly increasing. The
growth may be slight but at least it is not a loss.

Class changes are another matter.

Let's take a look:

Using the number of unexpired current licenses held by individuals
(not including those in the grace period) the license class changes
expressed as a percentage of the total number of licenses from Feb 22
2007 to Nov 25 2007 are as follows:

Novice: decreased from 3.5% to 3.2% - loss of 0.3%
Technician: decreased from 44.8% to 44.7% - loss of 0.1%
Technician Plus: decreased from 4.7% to 3.3% - loss of 1.4%
General: increased from 19.9% to 21.7% - gain of 1.8%
Advanced: decreased from 10.5% to 10.0% - loss of 0.5%
Extra: increased from 16.5% to 17.1% - gain of 0.6%

Combined Tech/Tech Plus: decreased from 49.5% to 48.0% - loss of 1.5%.

Since no new Novice, Tech Plus or Advanced licenses have been issued
since April 2007, their declines due to attrition, upgrading and the
renewal of all Tech Plus as Technician are to be expected. Note that
none of the license classes experienced a change of more than 1.8%,
and most experienced changes of less than 0.7%.

73 de Jim, N2EY