N5DUX - Licenses Issued

Graphing Ham Licenses

As you may know, the FCC has removed the Element 1 Morse Code test from the requirements for HF privileges on the ham bands. This prompted many Technicians to upgrade their licenses to allow them HF privileges. It was said that Volunteer Examiner offices were swamped with additional paperwork from those wishing to upgrade. I was curious to see just how much of an impact the rule change had on the number of hams going from Technician to General and on to Extra.

I wrote a small Perl script to tally the numbers of hams that were issued licenses for a particular month. The data was pulled from the QRZ Archives link and counted the number of "Issued" licenses.

Below are links to the raw data, data in table form and a graph showing the "spike" of those that upgraded. It is also interesting to note the rise in new hams (Technicians) that is displayed in March of both years. Of course, our data currently only goes back to January of 2006, so this is not the best statistical snapshot to use for Technicians. (My main goal was to capture the sharp climb in Generals issued.)

I hope you find the data useful. Please let me know how you use it or how I might better improve the system.


- N5DUX

  • See Graph
  • See Data
  • See Raw XML Data