As 2025 closed, I was curious if it were possible to come up with the number of new US amateur radio licenses issued during the year. After some digging around ULS for a couple of hours, I came to the conclusion that no, that is not possible, because there is no record of the original grant date on the license document. However, applications for new licenses are public information, and we can run a report that shows how many have a status of granted in a given year - while not perfect, the logic is close enough to be a roughly reliable number.

After running the number for 2025, I was even more curious to see how that compared to recent years - and then, of course, how it compared against all years. After about 20 minutes of coaxing, I came up with the following:

This brought to light an interesting, though not necessarily unsurprising, trend - the number of people getting amateur radio licenses each year is as high or higher than 25-30 years ago. The jump appears in 2006-2007, which corresponds with the FCC dropping the Morse Code requirement for obtaining an Amateur Radio license.

But Amateur Radio is dying!

Well, clearly not for a lack of licenses being issued. It is clear that easing the Morse code requirement was a net positive for new license issuance. The hobby isn’t dying - people are actively interested in joining and participating. That does seem to directly contradict all the anecdotal stories of dead repeaters, no contacts on 146.52, and a general lack of ragchewing QSOs on HF.

If new people aren’t on repeaters, or ragchewing, or playing on calling frequencies, then where are they? I personally think the answer is very clear based on the rise in popularity of programs like POTA/SOTA, chasing DX, and the evil FT8. These are programs that thrive on quick contacts and exchanges, providing the rush of a contact without going back and forth in drawn out discussions. It seem pretty clear that (by and large) people are highly interested in radio for one reason or another, and the audience is growing - but if you are a person who is complaining that people don’t want to rag chew, there should probably be some introspection. They probably just don’t want to ragchew about the same things you do. That’s not the death of the hobby - that’s people avoiding individuals and communities. If you want to attract more people, be something that people don’t want to avoid.