[boxerbomb]

In the 2024 field day contest that lasts 24 hours, 490,813 Morse code contacts were made between participants. Just turning on my radio now I heard more than 10 conversations in Morse happening and that was just on one of the 10 popular frequency bands.

[spogbiper]

31,628 people participated in field day 2024. google says there are ~750,000 amateur radio licenses in the US and ~3 million world wide. my experience with field day is that it attracts the most dedicated subset of radio amateurs, a group which (also in my experience) vastly over represents cw users. combined with the point of field day being to make as many contacts as possible, combined with cw being one of if not the best way to make difficult and long distant contacts.. can you see why i doubt field day results are an accurate representation of normal, average amateur radio?

i have attended club meetings and activities, hamfests local and around the US, participated in online forums etc for many years. morse code isn't a big topic anywhere outside of very specialized contexts, such as field day and qrp operation.