W5YI: Amateur Radio Demographics in the United States

In an online technology series entitled “Top 25 things vanishing from America?, editor Tom Barlow (who is N8NLO, Technician Class) lists Ham Radio as number sixteen. We quote:

“This series explores aspects of America that may soon be just a memory... In the past five years alone, the number of people holding active [Amateur Radio] licenses has dropped by 50,000, even though Morse Code is not longer a requirement.”

I don’t know where he got his information from ...but it is skewed at best or just plain wrong at worst. Determining how many active radioamateurs there are is really impossible to say. All you can go by is published statistics from the FCC.

There are currently 723,000 “active” radio licenses in the FCC database of which 11,000 are club call signs. (Amounts are rounded off.) The FCC considers an amateur license to be active for 12 years ...the 10 year license term plus an additional 2 year “grace period” during which licensees may renew their license without losing their call sign ...or having to be retested and start all over again.

Of the 712,000 radioamateurs in the FCC’s active database, 54,000 are expired licenses leaving 658,000 currently licensed. But that does not mean they are active on the ham bands. The figure for July 2003 (five years ago) is 687,000 - an apparent decrease of 29,000. But the licensing figures are really not comparable.

In 1984, the FCC extended the Amateur Radio license term from five to ten years. That meant that five year term licensees whose license was due to expire had their licenses extended another five years before they were eligible to be purged from the database. Since there were no expirations between 1984 and 1994 (when the ten year term kicked in); the actual census of radio amateurs was overstated for many years ...and understated for several years after that. See this graph posted by ARRL’s Ed Hare, W1RFI.

The bottom line is that you can’t accurately come up with the number of active amateurs over an extended period of time when it includes two different systems for purging expired licenses from the database. But even if you take the published figures, the decrease is no where near 50,000. Our best guess is that the ham ranks have been increasing slightly over the past 20 years.