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World Ham Population Ratios Pop Out
by Pablo Veal (N0AH)
On a recent visit by my father in law, F0EFQ, we got to discussing the declining ham population in France. When I compared a ratio of hams to the number of people in his country, it came up to be 2,495 people for every one ham radio operator.
In the U.S.A., that ratio was a lot better at 434:1. What a huge difference. But this U.S.A. number was not close to that of Japan's at 94:1.
Math here is (127,333,000pop/1,350,120hams) That is an amazing number. Putting it into football perspective, if your team were playing a home game with 80,000 fans, you would have over 850 JA operators with only 184 U.S.A. operators in attendance.
Would we even have contests if it were not for the JARL? Who would we work for points? However, it gets even more interesting from here.
Germany has a ratio of 1,044:1 while the U.K. is lower at 954:1. That was a surprise for me but the German ham population is growing well according to Internet research. When I researched my old contest logs, I found DL calls more common than the G's. (Brain jam.)
Spain is at 662:1 while Italy is almost three times this at 1,889:1. When I lived in Wyoming working pile-ups, I thought everyone on the radio was from Italy and I never heard an EA. Hum....
Brazil is 5,744:1 while Argentina is at 1,140:1. I love these operators on 10 meters when band conditions are dead in a contest and all you have is the America's to work. These ratios are great considering you have populations of 184,101,000 and 37,214,800 respectively.
Our neighbor to the north, Canada, had a ratio of 696:1 while Australia was at 825:1. I thought that they would be somewhat closer to that of the United States but they were not too far off.
Two big numbers really stood out in digging these numbers up on the Internet. Russia was at 3783:1. I thought the ratio number would be a lot higher due to the developments in the country over the last several years. But Russia is a lot smaller than I thought at only 143,782,300 people. The approximately 38,000 hams are very devoted from my experiences. How many zones do they still cover? -- And with so few hams? I can only see their ratio going down over time.
The last country in my research made me think. I would have to shake hands with over 72,000 people before I had a chance to meet one ham. And this country has around 15,000 operators at their best guess. But with a population of 1,080,264,300, India is a good zone area and country to work on for your 5BWAZ and 5BDXCC.
My statistics were gathered by sites found on Google and attempts were made to find the most recent population census and ham license information provided by third party resources.
One other tidbit, I tried to avoid countries that only reported licensed stations versus the number of licensed hams. Many hams operate from club stations in many countries and are not always counted in accurate numbers. Interesting eh?
For links to a good ham population site, go to: www.qsl.net/vu2msy/HAMPOP.htm
To sum things up, I believe we need to look at ratios as much as we do the numbers. For example, if someone told you that France had 23,698 hams, you might think that was fine. But compare the U.S.A. ratio to that of France (434:1 versus 2,495:1) and you see France, being a modern industrial country, might have a situation.
Other countries, with high ratios show excellent potential for growth such as Brazil and continued growth in DL.
Using ratio comparisons can be a viable means for modern countries to measure their ham population's health. -- It can also be used by any country to track the growth of its ham population.
Courtesy: www.eham.net/articles/11484
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Where In The World Are All The Hams?
Following an article in eHam.net which raised questions about the worldwide distributions of hams and engendered speculation about the possible reasons for differences in Ham populations across countries, Bob Olsen, KK7WN attempted to shed light on these issues.
He collected some demographic data from various sources including the United Nations, the IARU, and various other professional research organizations. He was able to find relatively complete and comparable information for 36 countries in North America, South America, Europe, Oceania and Asia. Although these countries make up a small portion of all countries, they do contain the �lion�s share� of the world�s Hams.
He focused on Hams as a percentage of a country�s population since it is obvious that more populous countries would be expected to have a larger absolute number of Hams. The average (median) has about one Ham for every 1300 residents. Examples of countries near this average include Sweden, Austria, Australia and the Netherlands.
The high-end �outliers� include Japan (1 per 99) and South Korea (1 per 333). Low-end �outliers� include Russia (1 per 33,000) and China (1 per 17,000, including Taiwan). Averages for countries by region are: North America (1 per 546), South America (1 per 2,800), Oceania (1 per 926), Scandinavia (1 per 819), Northern Europe (1 per 1,500), Southern Europe (1 per 2,100).
Ham percentages appear to be most influenced by a culture�s attitude toward �personal electronic gadgetry�. For example, holding all else constant, countries that have the greatest relative number of personal PCs and the greatest relative Internet use have the largest number of Hams per inhabitant. Ham percentages also appear to be strongly influenced by language. In particular, country Ham percentages are higher where a significant proportion of a country�s population speaks a language that is widespread worldwide. Again this influence is most noticeable in North America, Oceania and Scandinavia (where English is for many the academically required second language).
The very poor penetration of Ham radio in France (1 per 3,200) appears to be a function of a lesser acceptance of electronic gadgetry as well as generally acknowledged
lesser use of languages other than French.
Gross per capita income does not influence Ham penetration unless it is very low or accompanied by a strong general interest in electronic gadgetry. In fact, where gadgetry interest is low, higher incomes are associated with reduced relative interest in Ham radio.
Ham radio penetration is slightly greater where the population density is less. There is no evidence that this effect is related to the difficulty of antenna placement. It appears to be more related to an overall felt need to �stay connected�.
Courtesy: www.southgatearc.org/news/aug2005/where_are_the_hams.htm
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