Has HAM radio become outdated? Is HAM radio outdated? And what do the numbers say about the quantities of people getting licensed and retaining their license over the last fifteen or so years. Let's check this out. I got this article from Reddit because I was browsing around for some different stories and topics or follow ups on the FCC.
Delete delete, delete the deregulation video that I made a couple of weeks ago that talks about some verbiage changes to FCC policies for part ninety five, Part ninety seven, Part ninety But I ran across this article on Reddit and it caught my eye. Now, the FCC deregulation and it comes from this is a Reddit post obviously, and this is in the GMRS channel, and he's linking an article from the Hill dot com. Okay, with the FCC
looking for input deregulation of quote anything. How would this pertain to the future of handheld portable FM, HFUHF, et cetera. Will GMRS have a regulated future? Will HAM not require licensed thoughts? And there's some thoughts on this. And I'm not going to read hardly any of this to you guys, because it was this last comment that caught my eye. So this last comment right here was from a user.
Now that this whole article is eight months old, and all of these comments are eight months old at the time of this recording. Okay, but this is still pertinent information because of the FCCD regulation blah blah blah, Department of Government Efficiency and all that kind of jazz going on. Right now, Okay, Ham Radio. This line right here, this is from this guy named Texas Weed. Now I'm embarrassed that this guy's in Texas, quite frankly, and he's obviously
smoking some weed. Okay, so let's just read his statement here. Ham Radio has become outdated. One significant drawback is a lack of diversity among its participants, particularly regarding age and gender. First of all, that's not completely true. Second of all, I don't see that as a drawback. If HAM Radio was alive and well in the female community more so than the male community, and it was growing in numbers, as I'm going to demonstrate to you here in a second,
I still wouldn't see that as a drawback. So I don't really agree with his statement there, But let's move on. Okay. He says, if you attend to Hamfest. You'll notice the majority of attendees are older, white men, with very few people of color present. Okay, Again, the numbers might say that, but I don't see how that's a drawback. Okay. And again, everyone is welcome in Ham Radio, and I think we've demonstrated that in numerous videos and numerous of my live
streams in my happy hours. You need to check out a Bill Ham Radio tectonics, and you need to check out l from She's on frequency. Check some of those channels out and see. And yeah, there's a lot more white men making videos today than there are others. But anyone can do it. You are welcome to do it. Starts your own channel. This is the part right here that he's most wrong about. This is basically conjecture. This is his opinion. He has the right to his opinion,
just like everyone else does. I don't agree with his opinion, but he has the right to it. Okay. The second instance here is really kind of what we want to focus on anyways. Nowadays, a testing process for a teena HAM radio license has become overly simplified. It often feels like mere formality involving signing your name and paying a thirty five dollars fee. A lot of people want that that's not what you do. You actually have to know
some information to get ham radio license. And I agree with and respect the fact that people take the time to go get their hand radio license and study and take a course. Okay, I respect that, and I think that's something we should keep in place. Okay, otherwise it'll just become like CB radio. And a lot of people will say GMRS radio is already becoming that way. Because you just signed your name and buy a license. Anyone can easily pass the test. Since the question answer pool
is available for free online. That's been true for about five decades, maybe longer. So this is like, so what, you still have to know the material. It's not an open book test. They're not going to spoon feed you the answers during the test. You still got to know the material. It's a four hundred question pool of questions with thirty five test questions for both the technician and the general test, and then the extra pool is uh, it's either five or I think it's six hundred questions.
It might be more than that now. They've changed it a few times recently. Six hundred or so questions in the extra test question pool and fifty questions on that test, So you still have to know this material to pass the test. You can't just look it up or use your or google it during your test. You have to learn and know the material because you don't know which thirty five questions or which fifty questions are going to
be on your test. You can simply download this information and take the test without any real education, knowledge or skill. Despite making it easy, the numbers continued to dwindle. Okay, so I will agree that the test is easier than it was ten years ago, twenty years ago, something like that. In two thousand and six is when they removed the Morse Code requirements. So it used to be used to be a long time ago. You had Novice, General, Advanced,
and Extra. There might have been a technician in there as well, okay, But then they came out with the Technician no code. The Novice, the General, they Advanced, the Extra all required Morse Code and the difference was you had to do more words per minute as you upgraded your license. Okay, And then they came out with a Technician no Code, which was the first ever test and I think it was around nineteen ninety one or two.
That's the first license I got, which in nineteen ninety four, and they also had a Technician plus which was a few more questions, but also Morse code. And then eventually they got rid of all of that and they had Technician only, General only, and Extra only and it was all questions, no Morse code. And this happened in two thousand and six, and since then the numbers have pretty much with the exception of some COVID fluctuation, the numbers have been pretty much growing since then. And I'm going
to show you the graph that I found. I did some digging today and I found some graph and some numbers for people who the total number of licensed people and the total number of new licenses that we've seen since about two thousand and seven. First, let me tell you about red Odo Power. Red Odo is the sponsor of today's video. Red Odo is one of my favorite batteries. They make batteries in all sizes. They make RV batteries,
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So check out the link in the description from red Odo Power and use the coupon code of Ham Radio ten to save an additional ten percent off of all their Black Friday and Holiday sale prices this season. So this guy's basically just he's either trolling or he's got to stick up his butt about something. Okay, He's conjecturing a lot of opinions, misplaced opinions, misplaced guidance, and fake facts, fake news as it were. And this is what someone who has this mindset. It's not I'm not going to
start talking politically or anything. But so I did a little bit of digging, and I incorporated some websites, and I put some stuff together, and I did a analysis of the number of new Ham Radio licenses and total number of Ham Radio licenses since two thousand and six or seven or some of that information wasn't available, I should say, Okay, based on data from the AWL annual reports, news releases, and FCC statistics compiled by amateur radio clubs.
Here's a summary of the number of new ham radio licenses issued each year. Note that the exact figures for two thousand and six and seven were not available located in available resources. The Morse code requirement was eliminated in early two thousand and seven, and I actually think of two thousand and six, I think the AI got this part wrong, but leading to a surge starting that year. Yes, yeah, and that's been talked about in numerous videos since then.
The data shows a steady growth post two thousand and seven, peaking around twenty fourteen, possibly influenced by COVID et cetera, et cetera. So here's what we see. So in two thousand and eight, the number of new licenses in two thousand and eight was twenty eight thousand, sixty six, just over thirty thousand, two thousand and nine, twenty seven thousand,
twenty four thousand, twenty seven. It kind of peaks right here around two thousand and fourteen, with thirty three thousand, two hundred and forty one that year, and then it kind of remains pretty steady until twenty twenty, and it actually dropped in twenty twenty to twenty nine thousand, and then we got a surge in twenty twenty one because everyone a lot of the lockdowns started in like early twenty twenty and a lot of people were at home
watching YouTube. I got a surge on this channel watching my channel watchers in YouTube, and there was a lot of people asking about ham Radio licensing and hammereto testing.
So you can see right here at this graph which all these numbers right here in this list have been compiled into this graph right here, and you can see right there that the numbers kind of dipped a round twenty twenty, then they got a shot in the arm around twenty twenty one, and then for whatever reason, they kind of dip down in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three, probably because those numbers would have been a little bit more average if we didn't have such a
peak in twenty twenty one, Okay, And then you can see for twenty twenty four they came way back up. Over thirty thousand people got a new license in twenty twenty four. This is new hamm radio license issued per year from twenty eight to twenty twenty four. Okay, I think that's a respectable graph right there. I would like to see it go up a little bit more like this.
And I wonder if twenty twenty five is going to be higher than this, since it did such a jump from around twenty four thousand and nine to around thirty thousand and six, from twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four. Why are we seeing that. It's possible we're seeing that simply because of events like Hurricane Helen and Hurricane Harvey here in Texas a couple of years ago, and places overseas that are employing the help of hand radio operators
for earthquakes and tsunamis. I've been reading some stories about that lately. It's very possible that we've been seeing that type of thing. People are starting to take notice and recognize like they have in the past. People recognize this, and they kind of let it drop off for a while, and then they recognize it again. It's a whole new
group of people recognizing it. Okay, good. I think it's encouraging to see these numbers the way they are because, according to this guy's pedantic comment on this Reddit post, he says the numbers are dwindling, you would expect the numbers to go down if they're dwindling. Instead, the number of new licenses each year, again, this is not a total number. This is a number of new licenses each year continues to stay about the same or go up a little bit. And you can see that with this
graph right here. You can see it kind of steady from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty one. It's all kind of steady, and then it dipped a little bit in twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three. And I wonder how accurate that information is, honestly, because I have seen other graphs where it was basically remaining steady. It got a spike in twenty twenty one, and then it kind of dropped back down to where twenty nineteen twenty twenty were, and it remains steady to where you see it is
in twenty twenty four. So I question whether these numbers are accurate. Well, let's just say they are. Well, it's still an encouraging number to see it raise up about from six thousand more new licenses from twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four. Now, if we can look at the total number across the world. The data for worldwide I couldn't pull that. I couldn't get the AI, the groc AI to recognize that it said about three million
worldwide from two thousand seven to twenty twenty four. It gave the same exact number, and it even says that it says we weren't for worldwide totals. Comprehensives. Yearly data is not available as thearu's last full global survey was in two thousand, three million licenses. Okay, so they haven't done a global survey since then. Okay, So let's look
at USA licenses only. Total number of HAM radio licenses in the USA in two thousand and seven with six hundred fifty five thousand, eight hundred and today in twenty twenty four, seven hundred and forty four thousand. This is a total number of licenses, not just new licenses, not upgrades, everything together. How many people have a HAM radio license today? Again, we don't have twenty twenty five numbers because we're not
done with twenty twenty five yet. Maybe middle of next year I'll be able to do another video talk about twenty twenty five numbers. Don't know what those are yet. Okay, But as of the end of twenty twenty four there's seven hundred and forty four thousand licensed amateur radio operas just in the USA alone, as compared to ten years before that. In twenty fourteen, there was seven hundred and
twenty five thousand and twenty fourteen. So we saw a spike right here around like say two thousand and twenty twenty one, And that's what I expected to see, because we actually got a lot of more people licensed during COVID than what you would expect, and then it's kind of gone down since then. Sadly, some people probably actually died of COVID, especially given the age range of some ham radio operators. But and I'm sad to see that. I'm sad to see those numbers go down, of course,
I don't wish that in anybody. But the numbers still remain steady. So over the last seventeen years, in total, we had six hundred and fifty five thou seventeen years ago, and we have seven hundred and forty four thousand today, ninety thousand more than we had about seventeen years ago. So in all and all, the numbers keep going up each year, not down. So yeah, you can be sarcastic, you can be pedantic, you can be you know, down in the dumps. You can be half this glass empty
if you want to be. But the numbers speak for themselves. The number of lice of people getting their ham radio license generally increases each year. The number of newly licensed hams and the number of total license hams is on a steady rise. It's definitely not dwindling. If it was dwindling like this guy said it was, the you would see those numbers kind of steadily, either slowly or quickly increasing in a downward slope. And they're not doing that.
They're either going up or they're kind of staying steady. Okay. And you know, new people will come into the hobby every day, and people will go silent key every day sadly, and that's just kind of like the cycle of life. So it's up to you and I to get people interested in namature radio and tell them what it's actually about and not believe crap that you read on Facebook
and Reddit and Twitter. That's just all down in the dumps and sad, sad face people who have nothing better to do with their time than just queue about everything. So go out today, tell someone about ham radio. Tell someone how great it is, because this is one of the best hobbies that I have ever been a part of. I welcome you. I don't care what you look like. I don't care what your background is, I don't care
where you're from. If you're interested in amature radio, you're welcome in this channel, and I welcome you into this Ham fam as it's called seventy three guys. I appreciate you watching today. If you have comments about this or any questions or another topic, put a comment in the video below. And if you like this video. If you enjoyed this, check out these videos over here because YouTube things. You want to watch these next. We'll catch you next time.