Amateur Radio

In the spark era, wireless meant dots and dashes. A spark transmitter crashed out bursts of noise, a coherer tapped back Morse code, and that was supposed to be enough. Reginald Aubrey Fessenden, a Canadian-born inventor who had worked for Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, thought it was only the beginning. If a radio wave could be made steady, like a pure musical tone, instead of dying away in sparks, then a human voice might ride on it.

Sunday, October 18, 2026, opens with good news from orbit. Today's AMSAT News Service bulletin, ANS-291, reports that two student-built CubeSats are now aboard the International Space Station after launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on October 13 as part of NASA's 35th commercial resupply mission. PROVES-Maia, from Texas State University, will relay digital messages for radio operators over UHF and S-band and evaluate intersatellite routing, while PROVES-Taygeta, from Cal Poly Pomona and Mt.

GMRS began with a dream of radio for everyone. After World War II, inventor Al Gross demonstrated a pocket-sized UHF radio, and FCC Commissioner E. K. Jett championed a citizens radio service that would work almost like a telephone, quiet until someone called you. On April 10, 1947, the FCC created that service in the 460 to 470 MHz band and called it Class A Citizens Radio Service. The early gear was tube-type, limited to 60 watts of plate input power to the final amplifier tube, and it ran wideband FM with 50 kilohertz channel spacing.

Saturday is the heart of Jamboree on the Air and Jamboree on the Internet, running October 16 to 18 under the theme A Peaceful and Inclusive World, and Scouts are on the air today. At Pacificon in San Ramon, California, the Golden Gate Area Council and the Mount Diablo Amateur Radio Club are running a JOTA-JOTI station at the San Ramon Marriott from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. today, while Pacificon, the ARRL Pacific Division Convention, is in its second day. Across the country, Hamfest Chattanooga wraps up today, October 17, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

If you tuned across 20 meters in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s and heard a pileup suddenly tighten with excitement, there was a good chance the station everyone wanted was in Amman, Jordan. The callsign was JY1, about as short and memorable as a callsign gets, and the operator was Hussein bin Talal, king of Jordan. On the air he did not trade on his title. Fellow operators remembered a courteous, curious man who simply loved a good conversation, and the ARRL, of which he was a life member, regarded him as arguably the most famous radio amateur in the world.

The 21st annual ARRL Online Auction opens today, Friday, October 16, and runs through October 22 with more than 200 items up for bid. This year's list includes gear featured in QST product reviews, vintage books, pre-owned equipment, and signed original sketches by Salty Walt Hudson, K4OGO, along with four mystery boxes from the ARRL Lab team. Featured equipment includes an Icom solid-state amplifier, an Alinco 2-meter FM transceiver, and an Elecraft QRP transceiver package. Proceeds benefit ARRL education programs that help license new hams and support continuing technical education.

When Hurricane Katrina came ashore on August 29, 2005, near Buras, Louisiana, as a Category 3 storm with winds near 125 miles per hour, it knocked out power, telephones and much of the Gulf Coast's ordinary communications. In Hancock County, Mississippi, the county had lost contact with the outside world except through amateur radio operators, who stepped in as 911 dispatchers and relayed messages in and out. It was dramatic, but it was not improvised from nothing.

Good morning from N5XBI on Thursday, October 15. The bands should be calmer today after an unsettled start to the week. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center said in its October 14 discussion that solar activity stayed low, with departing Region 4549 producing C-class flares as large as C4.2 and C6.9, growing Region 4551 producing only low-level C-class activity, and newly numbered Region 4558 unremarkable. No Earth-directed coronal mass ejections were observed. SWPC expects low activity through October 16 with only a slight chance of an M-class flare, mainly from Region 4551.

In 1978, members of the Montreal Amateur Radio Club began sending ASCII data over VHF frequencies with homebuilt equipment, after Canadian authorities authorized the experiments. It was a bold idea for its time: instead of speaking into a microphone, a ham would let a computer chop a message into small bursts, send each burst with an address and error checking, and let the station at the other end reassemble it. When the United States Federal Communications Commission authorized ASCII transmissions for American amateurs in 1980, the experiment was ready to spread.

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.