2 Comments

This is a neat analysis. Do you have any thoughts about the mechanisms behind the distributions?

I can think of several:

1. Population mobility/migration: Some of the states that have high proportions of “non-resident” callsigns also tend to “import” people, whether retirees (arguably biasing the ham population) or job-seekers. I fall into this category, having lived in the 8th, 10th, 9th, and 3rd call districts as a holder of my present call.

2. Preferred callsign pressure: The 4th and 6th call districts have long had a shortage of “desirable” callsigns with respect to the others, especially the 9th, 1st, and 3rd districts. Before vanity callsigns, people occasionally registered their station address at a relative’s home in a different district to get a 2×1 callsign.

3. Puerto Rico is interesting. I assume that you filtered for [KNW]P[34][A-Z]{1,3} and not just [KNW]P4[A-Z]{1,3}, to use the regexps? If so, this probably represents the mobility (#1) of the population. I think a lot of Puerto Ricans work in the states as long as they can stand it and move/retire back to PR.

There is probably a way to isolate some of these phenomena…

Ethan – thanks for the reply. I’m in agreement on all your points. As for the KP type calls, based on the data provided by the FCC it is easy to tell all that *should* be in what the FCC indicates is the “12″ call area based on their address. For this filtering, the FCC data made it easy. Just running a quick check on KP, NP & WP calls, excluding PR and VI, far and away most calls are associated with a FL address with 298 followed by TX with 50 and NY with 42. FL has 298 [KNW]P calls and VI has 235, so more KP calls are now associated with FL addresses then VI addresses.