State of the Hobby

2019 State of the Hobby Survey

noreply@blogger.com (Dustin N8RMA) — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 05:00:00 +0000

Get ready operators - the 2019 State of the Hobby Survey is here!

I first want to take a moment to sincerely thank everyone for the fantastic participation in 2018. Our inaugural survey in 2017 found around 600 responses but 2018 came booming in with nearly 3,000 responses, voicing their opinions! A huge shout out to the blog / websites owners, podcast producers and large clubs for taking the time to promote the survey within their respective audiences - I could not have done this without you!

If you have not had a chance to see the results from previous years, they are listed here:

The survey started out in 2017 as simple curiosity. While browsing Reddit I began to notice several users posting surveys for highly specific topics. I made sure to participate yet often wondered what the results were. I then decided to host my own survey, to collect the opinions from the community on a variety of topics for comparison over the years. I wanted to ensure I made the results widely available for anyone to consume for whatever reason.

Thanks to feedback and inquiry from hundreds of participants, I've made a few minor changes to the survey. This year I've included some questions specific to 2019, which of course will change year to year. I hope to keep the core portion of the survey mainly intact (for that comparison) and continue to modify the annual section as deemed fit.

As always, please subscribe to my blog for email alerts on future survey and result activities.

2019 State of the Hobby Survey

*** Privacy Notice *** I am not affiliated with a company or organization, I am merely an individual conducting a survey for myself and others to learn more about the state of the hobby. Just a guy in Michigan. Any demographic questions are optional and are fairly standard for surveys. No data will be sold or given to anyone - it's to be used by me personally for the survey results only. No personal information will be associated with specific responses, including call signs.

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Dustin N8RMA) — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 16:33:00 +0000

Greetings folks - 2019 is upon us! I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable new year.

With a new year comes a new annual survey, and another chance to pick the brains of operators worldwide for what they like and dislike about amateur radio, as well as their opinions. Last year was a fantastic survey and I highly recommend checking out the results, if you have not done so. I am eternally thankful for all the blogs, sites and podcasts that picked up the 2018 State of the Hobby survey and push it out to such a wide audience.

This brings us to now. I spent a fair amount of time sifting through comments and suggestions from last year and how I'd like to incorporate that feedback. I received some excellent ideas and I think you'll find the changes to the survey to be more inclusive and more holistic than before. The idea behind this survey is to grow each year. I will be spending the month of February preparing and polishing the survey for release in March. This year the survey will run for a whole month, allowing for the maximum amount of participation.

In previous years I collected email address so I could send out future surveys and results. I'm happy to say the survey and participation has grown to a size where that is not feasible, based on me being an individual doing this on a shoestring budget. I was able to secure this site from some small generous donations, and perhaps in the future I'll open it up for additional community support. Being that I won't collect email addresses, the best way to stay up to date is to subscribe to this blog. You can do this a variety of ways, email, RSS feed or via social media.

Again, I hope everyone had a fantastic new year and I look forward to your participation in March!

Dustin
N8RMA

2018 State of the Hobby Results

noreply@blogger.com (Dustin N8RMA) — Fri, 13 Apr 2018 19:40:00 +0000

The results are in!

I truly hope you read and enjoy the results from this year. Between the survey, the data modeling and cleansing, making the analytics and presentation, I'd say this is about 100 hours worth of work. It was certainly fun, and while you may think I have a pretty demented definition of fun....no actually you'd be right about that, no argument here.

If you are interested in participating next year, please subscribe to my blog. New surveys and results will be posted here so by subscribing you will get any and all updates.

Anyway - on to the results!

2018 Survey is now closed!

noreply@blogger.com (Dustin N8RMA) — Fri, 06 Apr 2018 15:56:00 +0000

The 2018 survey is now closed!

I want to extend a HUGE thank you to everyone who participate, and to those who passed this on to other hams as well. This year had a much larger turnout that 2017 and hopefully this trend will continue.

So - the 65 million dollar question is...when will the results be posted?

Short answer is anywhere from 4-8 weeks from now.

My next steps are to pull the data out of the survey and begin to cleanse and normalize. Each question with an open ended response can be anywhere from 10-15 hours of work, depending on the variance of the response. It's important to me that each response is valued, as a result I want to ensure this is done well.

As an example, I provided some options for "How did you find this survey?" and also left it open to people to enter in their own choices. Some example responses I received are:

Email
Emailed
Emailed from another ham
Got an email from my dad
Gmail
Someone mailed it to me online

I have to normalize all these responses into one category so the overall picture of how the survey was received is as accurate as possible.

Secondly, there is some cleansing to be done as well. When there are multiple entries from a singular call sign, those are pruned out. The validity of the data depends on this kind of pruning. In addition to pruning duplicate call signs, I have some other tricks up my sleeve, which I won't go into. This is a unique problem that doesn't have a great solution. Google Surveys will allow me to lock this down to one response per person, however that requires a Google account to be used. This can create large groups of people who are unable to complete the survey and I want this survey to be completed by as many hams as possible.

After this the data is then modeled, in a way I can use to analyze for insights. This enables the ability to make correlated assumptions, such as "does the reported income level change a preferred radio company?" or "a large percentage of young hams feel that old hams are a problem in the hobby" and vice verse. This gives much deeper insight when compared to a simply pie chart response.

The final step is to pull all this into a presentation vehicle (in this case Microsoft Sway) and publish out to you, in the hopes you enjoy it and learn something. This is where I can be creative and I make sure to take some additional time here to make it "look pretty". I'm not paid to do this, it's a fun diversion from college and work, so it takes some time. If I continue to do this, I'll probably formalize a more rigid structure and road map.

So that's it folks - the data is in and soon enough we'll have something meaning and interesting to look at. Again, I hope it's something you enjoy reading and that you learn even one thing from it. If you have questions, please reach out to me and I'll respond when I can.

Dustin N8RMA

2018 Survey Still Open!

noreply@blogger.com (Dustin N8RMA) — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 18:06:00 +0000

I had posted around a few weeks ago that the survey was due to close on 13-MAR-2018 for this year. That was originally my plan, but you know how plans go....

Our good friends on the other side of the globe, WA Amateur Radio News were kind enough to feature the survey on their weekly podcast (NewsWest Weekly Broadcast) and website. They reached out and asked if the survey could be reopened for a few weeks to allow their audience to participate - I couldn't or wouldn't say no to some more data.

Special thanks to Glynn VK6PAW for promoting the survey and for helping give radio amateurs in Western Australia a voice.

73!

2018 State of the Hobby Survey

noreply@blogger.com (Dustin N8RMA) — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 18:03:00 +0000

Once again I'm hosting a "State of the Hobby" survey for 2018.

This started out in 2017 as simple curiosity. While browsing Reddit I began to notice several users posting surveys for highly specific topics. I made sure to participate yet often wondered what the results were. I then decided to host my own survey, to collect the opinions from the community on topics that I cared about. I wanted to ensure I made the results widely available for anyone to consume for whatever reason.

This is the second year I've hosted this survey. Last year I had 688 unique respondents. While this is a good amount of responses, given the amount of amateur radio operators out there, I'm striving to increase this amount each year of the survey. I'm a year older and a year wiser, as such I've listened to user feedback on my survey from last year and attempted to incorporate that constructive feedback moving forward.

Please, help me by completing the survey and passing it on to others who may find it interesting. Thank you!

2018 Survey

*** Privacy Notice *** I am not affiliated with a company or organization, I am merely an individual conducting a survey for myself and others to learn more about the state of the hobby. Just a guy in Michigan. Any demographic questions are optional and are fairly standard for surveys. No data will be sold or given to anyone - it's to be used by me personally for the survey results only.

2017 State of the Hobby Results

noreply@blogger.com (Dustin N8RMA) — Thu, 02 Mar 2017 18:01:00 +0000

Here are the compiled results from the 2017 (inaugural) run of the State of the Hobby survey. I had 688 unique responses from over the globe.

I used various social media outlets to promote this survey. Facebook turned out to be the best vehicle, in terms of receptiveness. Reddit was characteristically nasty about it. I don't know what I expected.....

2017 State of the Hobby Results

The Origins of the SOTH (State of the Hobby)

noreply@blogger.com (Dustin N8RMA) — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 17:59:00 +0000

This survey started out as simple curiosity.

While browsing Reddit on the amateur radio subreddit I began to notice several users posting surveys for highly specialized topics. I completed the surveys and began to wonder what the results were. I then decided to host my own survey, to collect the opinions from the community on topics that I cared about. I wanted to make sure I made the results widely available for anyone to consume for whatever reason. Again, this is not meant to be an exhausting study of the hobby, but about the nagging questions I had about the community as a whole.

I hear time and time again things like "the hobby is growing, just look at the licenses being issued!", which is but one figure that can indicate the growth of amateur radio. It's not the only factor however, and I wanted to know more about that. I also wanted to know about new, emerging facets of an already diverse hobby. Lastly I wondered about perceptions of operators, which can indicate trends both now and down the pipeline. I wanted to do this in a way that was tangible over a decade or more.

About Me:
I've been into ham radio for about 5 years now. I've taken some time off here and there due to life, but always really enjoyed the hobby. I'm not a professional pollster, but I do operate within the capacity of organizational analytics. I've learned over the years about polling and demographics, along with data modeling and light statistical analysis. I am a analyst by trade so turning data into something meaningful is what I do for a living. This survey is by no means follows rigid survey methodology, although it borrows from best practices. I will say this, the only thing rigid about it was my curiosity about certain topics.