May 12, 2026 – “Breakdown of Amateur Radio licenses in Utah, Idaho and Nevada”
Good evening. This is W1UT and tonight’s topic will be a little different. By the way if anyone listening has a topic they would like to present, please let me know. I am quickly running out of topics and would like this ~5 min training period to continue as long as possible. For example if there is someone that would like to present training on APRS, Winlink, Echolink or even digital modes that would be great. For example, I know next to nothing about APRS other than it is a way to send position data via packet radio from your vehicle which is uploaded to the internet allowing your position to be placed on a moving map.
Tonight’s topic provides information about “Breakdown of Amateur Radio licenses in Utah, Idaho and Nevada”. I know this is a rather unusual topic, but I thought it might be of interest to all of you amateur radio operators in these three states.
The information I will provide is found on the ARRL website which is updated every business day. For example the state with the fewest hams is North Dakota with only 1,412 operators. The state with the most operators is California with 90,117 hams.
Another interesting statistic is the density of hams per square mile. For Utah that is 0.21 for Idaho that is 0.12 and for Nevada the density is 0.07 hams per sq mile. This shows how few hams we have in the intermountain west.
Here are some interesting stats for the state of Idaho. There are currently 10,141 ham operators in Idaho. 6,347 are technicians, 2,066 are general and 1,728 are extra class licensees. The percentage breakdown as of May 10, 2026 is Technicians 63%, Generals 20% and Extras 17%. As expected the Technician class hams make up the largest percentage.
In Utah there are currently 17,811 hams. 12,171 are technicians, 3,390 are general and 2,250 are extra class licensees. The percentage breakdown is Technicians ~55%, Generals 24% and Extras 21%. Again as expected Technician class hams make up the largest percentage.
In Nevada there are currently 7,709 hams. 4,274 are technicians, 1,841 are general and 1,595 are extra class licensees. The percentage breakdown is Technicians ~68%, Generals 19% and Extras ~13%. As expected Technician class hams make up the largest percentage.
Across the three states there are 35,661 hams and across the US and its territories there are 734,450 hams. This means that Idaho, Utah and Nevada hams represent only 4.9% of all the hams in the country. US hams in the inter-mountain west are a relatively small percentage of the total US ham population.
I could have broken this data down further by county but that was a lot more work. I did look at three counties in Utah which are Salt Lake, Utah and Cache. Salt Lake has 7227 hams, Utah has 6786, and Cache county 1601 hams. This represents 88% of the total hams in Utah.
There you go. I hope this information has been of interest to all listening to this net tonight. As usual this data will be posted on the Utah VHF society website later this week.
Here is the latest data on Advanced and Novice class numbers for Utah and Arizona: