Satellites

Good morning from the shack on Wednesday, October 14. If the bands sound a little restless today, the Space Weather Prediction Center has an explanation. In its October 13 forecast discussion, SWPC reported low solar activity, with Region 4549 producing a largest flare of only C1.2 early that morning and no new Earth-directed coronal mass ejections observed. Solar activity is expected to stay low through October 15, though forecasters put the chance of M-class flares at 35 percent.

Some of the most exciting new ham satellites are barely bigger than a coffee mug. On October 1, 2026 — a few days earlier than planned — a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched the Transporter-18 rideshare mission carrying AMSAT-Deutschland's three ERMINAZ-2 nanosatellites into orbit. Built at the satellite laboratory in the radome of the Bochum Observatory, the trio are 1P PocketQubes: just 50 millimeters on a side and about 250 grams each, now circling in sun-synchronous orbit at roughly 500 kilometers.

It began with a beep from a box of tin and wire. On December 12, 1961, barely four years after Sputnik, a group of California hams called Project OSCAR lofted the first amateur satellite, a battery-powered box that keyed "HI" in Morse on two meters until its batteries faded. That launch proved ordinary radio amateurs could put hardware in space, but a loose coastal club was no way to run a space program.

The ham radio Olympics got a new winner — three years after the fact. The WRTC Sanctioning Committee has disqualified the original winner of WRTC 2022, held in Italy in 2023, after an expanded cheating investigation. The I44W team, UW7LL and VE3DZ, deliberately revealed its identity through pre-contest frequency handoffs, and 21 pirated callsigns made fraudulent multiplier-enhancing contacts that disproportionately benefited that team and the ninth-place I43Z team, RW7K and RA9P.

Four years after Sputnik 1, a group of California amateurs decided the space age should not belong to governments alone. In December 1961, they put their own satellite in orbit — and it worked.

Hurricane Isaias is coming ashore tonight. The storm that formed in the Gulf of Mexico on October 7 strengthened into a hurricane within 20 hours, becoming the first hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic season, and is expected to make landfall late tonight or early Saturday along the northern Gulf Coast, likely as a Category 1 or 2. Hurricane warnings stretch from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to the Bay/Gulf County line in Florida. NHC Director Mike Brennan calls storm surge the deadliest threat: five to seven feet from Ocean Springs to Indian Pass and in Mobile Bay, arriving after dark.

Tropical Storm Isaias is the story every ham along the Gulf Coast should be watching. The National Hurricane Center named the storm early Wednesday in the Bay of Campeche, and forecasters expect it to become the first hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic season by Thursday, strengthening to a Category 2 with 109-mph winds before a Friday landfall along the northern Gulf Coast. A hurricane watch runs from Bay St.