FCC

Tuesday opens with a geomagnetic storm watch in effect. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center expects mostly active conditions on October 13 and 14, with isolated G1 minor storming likely today as a coronal hole high-speed stream moves into a geoeffective position. A separate SWPC watch lists G1 as the highest level predicted for October 13, with no storm watch in effect for October 14, so HF operators should expect changeable high-latitude propagation and a chance of aurora at northern latitudes tonight.

For most of its early life, two meters belonged to AM, CW, and homebrew rigs with modest range. A mobile station might reach a few miles on its own, and then geography won. The idea that changed everything was borrowed from commercial radio: put a receiver and a transmitter together on a hilltop or tall building, let the receiver listen on one frequency and the transmitter speak on another, and suddenly a small radio in a car could be heard across an entire city. FM, already proven by police, fire, and taxi fleets, gave the system clean, quiet audio to carry.

The Sun gave radio operators a breather this weekend. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center cancelled its G2 geomagnetic storm watch on October 11 — conditions no longer warranted it. This morning's 27-day outlook has the 10.7 cm solar flux at 120, the planetary A-index at 16, and the predicted Kp at 4. Sunday's observed flux was 122.

If you are studying for your first amateur radio license, the test you take today is not the test your Elmer took a few years ago. On December 18, 2025, the NCVEC Question Pool Committee released the 2026-2030 Technician Class (Element 2) question pool, and it became mandatory for every exam session starting July 1, 2026. The old 2022-series exam booklets expired on June 30, so anyone testing this year is working from the new material.

The biggest radio-regulatory story of the week landed in Washington on Wednesday. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr published the agenda for the Commission's October 29 open meeting, and two items touch the spectrum world we live in every day. The Commission will vote on advancing a new spectrum auction for direct-to-device satellite services — the technology linking ordinary smartphones straight to satellites — and on finalizing rules to open roughly 50 MHz of low-band spectrum, including the 800 MHz cellular band, for commercial drone operations.

Amateur radio’s RF exposure rules could be in for their first serious federal re-examination in years. On September 17, 2026, two federal agencies opened parallel proceedings touching on RF safety — and while nothing changes for hams today, the comment deadlines land this month.

Your GMRS radio may one day send its location — and a short text — on its own. That is the future an Australian radio maker is asking the FCC to bless, and the Commission is listening.

Ask most GMRS users where their service came from and you will get a shrug. But the General Mobile Radio Service is one of the oldest radio services the FCC ever created — older than CB, older than FRS, and nearly as old as amateur radio licensing itself.

In April of 1917, as the United States entered the First World War, every amateur radio operator in the country received the same grim letter from the Department of Commerce: get off the air and dismantle your antennas. More than six thousand hams, at the height of the spark era, fell silent almost overnight. The American Radio Relay League, formally organized that very year, suddenly had nothing to relay — so it did the next most useful thing it could think of: it recruited its members into the nation's communications services.