The 2010 JARTS RTTY ham radio contest this past weekend uses the operators age as the exchange. Operators are supposed to send their age and this analysis is based on what they sent being accurate. A YL can send 00 if they desire and I had 1 operator send 00. There was also at least 1 YL and there could have been more that sent their actual age. Any multi-op participants needed to send 99 as their age. I did this analysis for the 2009 JARTS RTTY contest and the numbers haven’t changed much.

I threw out the 00 and handful of 99’s and out of my 300 contacts and that left 287 Q’s. I eliminated the dups so each operators record occurred just once in the data and that brought it down to 219 unique calls, again excluding the 00 and 99 records. Here’s what the data shows:

Youngest logged was 28. I saw in the 3830 reports that someone logged an operator (young lady) that was sending 10 as their age. Very impressive!

Oldest logged was 85. I logged 4 operators at 80+ years old.

Average age across all the contacts was 58 years.

Median age is 60. Median represents, the middle age (what record #110 out of 219) shows. Half the entries I logged fell at or below that and half the entries I logged were at or above that age.

Mode is 62 which means of all the ages I logged, 62 years old was the most popular age.

US average age logged is 60.5 which is above the overall average across all contacts. The youngest op sent 33 as their age.

Canadian average age logged is 57.5 which is just below the average across all contacts. The youngest op sent 41 as their age.

International (non-US & non-Canadian) age logged is 54.5 which is 3.5 years below the average across all the contacts I made.

Again, the numbers from this year which represent a slightly smaller sampling then my contacts last year are very close to being the same with some numbers identical to last year.

73,
K2DSL