Overview of Special Call Sign Survey

Introduction

This section of the website summarizes the results of the 2x1 callsign survey conducted during February and March of 2006. The responses to the initial 5 questions are presented graphically. The survey also invited comments on four additional topics and the responses are presented here in their entirety. The comments are presented exactly as received, except callsigns and names have been removed or changed to protect the innocent.

Immediately following is some insight into how the survey was performed, the number of people that were contacted, a summary of the response level to the survey and a discussion of our confidence that the findings accurately represent all segments of the Canadian radio sport community. During the conduct of the survey, additional comments were received via email. These, too, are presented in anonymized form.

Use the menu on the left to go immediately to survey items of interest to you

In case you did not participate in the survey, you can still see what questions were asked by clicking here or on the menu item "Survey form" on the left side of this page

Sample size and response rate

Radio sport enthusiasts were identified by examining the reported results of 19 popular contests in 2004-2005. For more details see An Initial Characterization of the Size and Activity Levels of the Canadian Radio Sport Community

On February 21, 2006 emails were sent to 540 radio sport enthusiasts asking them to participate in a survey about their preferences for the allocation of 2x1 callsigns in.  A reminder email was sent on March 13, 2006 to individuals that had not yet completed the survey encouraging them to participate before the closing date.  The sample size and response rate are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1 – Survey Sample and Response Rate

E-mail addresses for 42 individuals were found to be invalid. To the best of our knowledge 498 individuals should have received emails inviting them to participate in the survey.

Approximately 25 individuals encountered technical difficulties. Most of the difficulties were solved through email exchanges. Surveys from 9 respondents had to be manually processed.

The survey was completed by 187 individuals for an excellent overall response rate of 37 percent of those contacted.

Confidence in the findings

A detailed analysis was done on the 540 callsigns to determine the approximate sizes of the core, regular and casual contesting communities in Canada. Using this information the percentage of survey respondents from each of these communities was determined to ensure that each community was well represented.

The relative sizes of core, regular and casual contest communities were determined by analyzing 13 HF CW/SSB contests from the original 19 contests.

480 callsigns or 90% of all callsigns participated in at least one of the HF contests. A count was made of the number times each callsign entered these contests. This information was used to determined the number of callsigns that entered 1, 2, … 13 contests. The results are reported in Table 2.

Table 2 – Participation in 13 HF CW/SSB contests

A core community of 57 callsigns or 12% of the total community participated in 6 or more contests. The regular community we defined as the 114 callsigns or 24% of the total community who entered 4 or more contests. Note that the core community is included within the regular community. The causal community was defined as the 76% of  callsigns that entered 3 or fewer contests.

Using the above information we can say that more than 60% of the core and regular contest communities answered the survey.

We are confident that the survey results accurately represent the desires of Canadian radio sport community.