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2019 State of the Hobby Survey

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! We also want to thank our sponsor - SportBet, who made a great contribution to our cause. 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: 20182017 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 av…
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Happy New Year!

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 wil…
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2018 State of the Hobby Results

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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!

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2018 Survey is now closed!

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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: EmailEmailedEmailed from another hamGot an email from my dadGmailSomeone mailed it to me online I have to normalize all these response…
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2018 Survey Still Open!

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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!
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2018 State of the Hobby Survey

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 ot…
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2017 State of the Hobby Results

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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
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