Many may have been wondering when the first amateur radio license in the KF8… series will emerge. At the time of this writing (December 23rd), the FCC has issued licenses in the KE8… series up to KE8ZTX. This was issued to Terry R. Clark today. It is presumed that a linear extrapolation may be used to estimate when that blessed day will come that the license KF8AAA is issued.
To that end we queried the FCC data base looking for the license KE8ZAA to see when it was issued. It was issued on August 24th of this year. We then queried to see what the latest license we could find was issued. We found that KE8ZTX was issued today. That represents a total of 517 amateur radio licenses issued between August 24th and today, a duration of 121 days.
This therefore defines a linear slope of 517 licenses every 121 days or 4.27 licenses per day.
We will assume that a process of linear extrapolation will solve for a reasonable expectation date for the issuance of the amateur radio license KE8ZZZ and therefore also the emergence of KF8AAA issuing in an all new series of amateur radio licenses. There remain 158 amateur radio licenses yet to be issued from today until KE8ZZZ and ultimately KF8AAA.
158 licenses * 1 day / 4.27 licenses = 37 days
37 days from today is January 29th. Of course, we must recognize that the vast majority of licenses occur over weekends but the actual issuance of licenses from that testing usually occurs the following Monday or Tuesday. As it happens, January 29th of 2024 falls on a Monday so we conclude that no adjustment is necessary.
Concerning us in the Washtenaw County region, most testing happens on the second Saturday, both in Washtenaw and Jackson Counties. Therefore, we should not expect to host the blessed amateur in our region on or near that day.
The next question should be…when will we hear a station KF8… announce itself over the airways. You decide.
