Amateur Radio

West Africa is coming to a pileup near you. From November 11 to 23, 2026, the Belgian Rockall DX Group will activate Guinea as 3X4U, operating from the shores of Lac de Koba on all HF bands from 160 through 10 meters — with possible 6-meter activity — on CW, SSB, and FT8/FT4. Guinea remains a sought-after DXCC entity for operators worldwide, especially on the low bands and in mode-specific award chases, and this expedition is built to serve them all.

The week of October 19-23, 2026 is one of the best weeks of the year to be listening on the HF bands. That is when the ARRL School Club Roundup puts students on the air — elementary through college stations calling CQ and working the world, with voice, CW, and digital modes. The twice-yearly event runs from 1300Z Monday to 2359Z Friday, in the third full school week of October, and it is the friendliest entry point young operators will ever find.

Mark the calendar and warm up the amplifier: the CQ WW DX Contest SSB — the most popular amateur radio competition on the planet — runs from 0000Z Saturday, October 24 to 2359Z Sunday, October 25, 2026. Always held on the last full weekend of October, it is sponsored by the World Wide Radio Operators Foundation, and for 48 hours the HF bands turn into a wall-to-wall celebration of working the world on voice.

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.

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 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.

In 1947, the ham bands belonged to AM: big, warm signals sprawling across six kilohertz, from transmitters that glowed like space heaters and weighed as much as refrigerators. Then a strange new sound appeared — quacking, Donald Duck gibberish on the frequencies where experimenters were testing a mode that threw away the carrier and one entire sideband. Single sideband sounded awful on an ordinary AM receiver, but it carried a whisper around the world on a fraction of the power — and within two decades, with a little help from a speck of germanium, it would remake the ham shack.

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.

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.