[Lowfer] Lowfer Survey...

[John Davis]

>I am compiling a list of the people that listen for Lowfer signals and
>sometimes send out reception reports direct with no mention on the
>Lowfer reflector of the receptions. I have received two such reports with
>one being direct email and the other arrived today via the mailbox. No
>one on thereflector knows these two people, as far as I know, and we
>are wondering if they are just people that listen for beacons and never
>post to the reflector. ...{snip}... Then in the future
>we can figure out how this person figured out who we are and how to
>contact us.

ROFL !   We're at last so immersed in the email age that we're amazed to
discover other communication methods are still out there, and are still used
by real people!  :-)

I don't mean to derive TOO much mirth from all this, but as one of the
people heavily involved in keeping a couple of those media working, I do
have to enjoy the irony when someone using an "old-timey" method such as the
WWW to keep in touch with beacon activity, or someone else using a really
prehistoric method like paper and ink and postage stamps, can cause such
puzzlement on an email reflector.

This is not to put down your curiosity, Mike.  I, too, would really love
some hard data on how many people use which methods to keep track of
beacons, so I wish you luck with your survey.  (Although by calling upon
only folks who can read this reflector, do expect to get results that are
considerably skewed.)

Here are some admittedly very rough approximations, but maybe they'll
provide a useful perspective to start with:

*There are about 200 users of this reflector.
*By definition, all of them have some degree of interest in LowFER activity,
although any typical week will not see postings from more than one or two
dozen regulars.  So your hypothesis about a lot of silent observers who
sometimes contact a beacon operator directly, probably holds true in a lot
of cases.  But there are even more LowFER enthusiasts out there not covered
by this list!  Read on.
*Somewhere between a quarter and a third of this list's members are LWCA
members; meaning, roughly 50-70 folks who overlap both groups (hard to tell
exactly without having current copies of both databases, but only
peripherally important).
*There are 500 LWCA members, give or take a dozen in any given month.
*In the old days, over half of LWCA members were involved in either
transmitting or listening for LowFER beacons.  That's no longer the case,
but we can figure about a third are still involved; some perhaps only to the
extent of listening several nights a week during the peak season, some quite
a bit more.
*That means there are almost as many LWCA members who do some LowFERing as
there are non-LWCA members on this list.  That alone almost doubles the
population of Planet LowFER.
*Add to that the fact that there are 4000 hits per average month on the
Longwave Home Page, 2000 on the LW Message Board, and probably that many on
the Noise Floor site.  A good many of these (dozens a month in summer,
hundreds in winter) check out the LowFER/MedFER online lists--including our
contact list at LWCA!

The dozen or so absolutely most active LowFERs on a daily basis are regular
participants in this board, and that's great.  It's a forum well suited to
the purpose, and keeps a lot of the rest of us informed on the state of the
art as well.  Yet we also need to remember that, all told, there are easily
three or four times as many people out there who have some interest in or
involvement with LowFERs and Part 15 and LF ham activity generally as there
are total members of this reflector.  That's why I agree wholeheartedly when
you say:

>I think it is great that there are other listeners out there
>looking for our tiny signals. All reception reports are very much
>appreciated.


And this, in turn, is my opportunity to put in one of those perpetual plugs
for Updating Your Beacon Listings whenever there is a change...and telling
me what I need to know to keep your contact info current, too.

It's NOT JUST THE PEOPLE ON THIS REFLECTOR who would like to copy your
signal!  The online lists and The Lowdown reach a mighty high percentage of
the *rest* of those folks.

The truth, as they used to say on a certain popular TV show, is out there.
And so are the listeners.  Don't overlook them.

73,
John