Amateur Radio

When Hiram Percy Maxim helped found the American Radio Relay League in 1914, the word relay in its name was a promise, not a description. No single amateur station could reach very far, so messages had to hop from station to station. In the December 1916 issue of QST, Maxim put the promise to a test, asking whether a handful of operators could work up a plan to carry a message from the Atlantic Coast to the Pacific Coast and get an answer back the same night. Nobody, he wrote, had yet proved it could be done.

AMSAT's newest weekly bulletin, ANS-298, dated October 25, leads with fresh numbers for the satellite fleet. On October 23, Drew Glasbrenner, KO4MA, AMSAT president and OSCAR number administrator, designated two German PocketQubes at the request of AMSAT-DL: ERMINAZ-2U is now AMSAT-OSCAR 129, or AO-129, and ERMINAZ-2V is AMSAT-OSCAR 130, AO-130. The three ERMINAZ-2 satellites launched October 1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare from Vandenberg Space Force Base, carrying pre-stored slow-scan television images and digipeater payloads.

The biggest weekend in HF contesting is under way. The 2026 CQ World Wide DX Contest, SSB, started at 0000 UTC on Saturday, October 24, and runs through 2359 UTC on Sunday, October 25, on six bands only: 160, 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters. The objective is to contact as many other amateurs in as many CQ zones and countries as possible, and the exchange is simple, an RS report plus the CQ Zone number of the transmitter location, for example 59 05. Stations may be contacted once on each band. A few hours on the air is a fine way to add new zones and countries to a log.

The biggest contest weekend of the year is hours away. The CQ World Wide DX Contest, SSB, runs from 0000 UTC Saturday, October 24, through 2359 UTC Sunday, October 25, on the six HF contest bands from 160 through 10 meters. The exchange is an RS report plus your CQ zone, and the object is to work as many zones and countries as possible. For operators in the Mountain West the starting gun fires this evening, Friday, at 6 PM local time. Logs go in by web upload only, and the deadline is tight: 2359 UTC on Tuesday, October 27.

The International Space Station starts sending pictures over amateur radio today. ARISS lists its Expedition 75 Series 34 slow-scan television event, themed “ARISS Hardware,” as beginning Thursday, October 22 at 15:30 UTC and concluding Sunday, October 25 at 18:00 UTC. The images will be transmitted at 437.55 MHz, plus or minus Doppler shift, in Robot 36 mode, with each transmission lasting 36 seconds followed by a two-minute gap. AMSAT-UK adds that the transmissions come from the amateur station in the ISS Service Module under the callsign RS0ISS.

Wednesday, October 21, opens with unsettled to active conditions on the bands. In its 3-day forecast issued at 0030 UTC on October 21, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said the greatest observed 3-hour Kp over the past 24 hours was 3, below storm levels, but the greatest expected Kp for October 21 through 23 is 4.67, which is G1 on the NOAA scale. Forecasters said G1 minor geomagnetic storming is likely on October 21 due to coronal hole high speed stream effects, with the highest forecast values, 4.67, in the 00-03 and 06-09 UTC periods today.

Tuesday, October 20, 2026 — If you hear an unusual signal sweeping the lower HF bands in the small hours this week, it may be Alaska. The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, HAARP, begins a five-day research campaign today, October 20, running through October 24 UTC in support of two sounding rocket missions from the Poker Flat Research Range, north of Fairbanks. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute says HAARP will transmit daily from 0530 to 0930 UTC, with all transmissions between 2.8 and 10 MHz and frequencies varying as conditions dictate.

In the spring of 1914, Hartford, Connecticut, had two very different radio men with the same idea. Hiram Percy Maxim was a well-known inventor in his forties, a graduate of MIT and the son of the inventor of the Maxim gun. Clarence D. Tuska was not yet twenty, the secretary of the Radio Club of Hartford and already an ardent experimenter. Together, in May 1914, they founded the American Radio Relay League, with Maxim as president and Tuska as secretary, to do one practical thing: pass messages farther than any single amateur station could reach on its own.

The week opens with students on the air and closes with the biggest contest weekend of the fall. The ARRL School Club Roundup runs Monday through Friday, October 19 to 23, from 1300 UTC Monday to 2359 UTC Friday, with elementary, middle, high school and college clubs working each other and the rest of us, so listen for fresh school calls all week.

Monday, October 19, 2026, opens a busy week on the bands, led by the ARRL School Club Roundup. The fall session runs October 19 through 23, beginning at 1300 UTC Monday and ending at 2359 UTC Friday. School clubs from elementary school through university exchange contact information with each other and with any other station, and individuals and non-school clubs are encouraged to take part. A station may operate no more than six hours in any 24 hours and 24 hours total, so give young operators a contact when you hear them.