Amateur Radio

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.

On October 16 through 18, some of the busiest operators on the amateur bands will not be seasoned DXers — they will be kids. Jamboree on the Air (JOTA), the largest annual Scouting event in the world, returns for its 2026 run, linking millions of Scouts and Guides across more than 150 countries by radio and the internet (as JOTI, the Jamboree on the Internet).

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.

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.

One night in April 1914, Hiram Percy Maxim sat down at his one-kilowatt station in Hartford, Connecticut — call sign 1WH, one of the best-equipped amateur stations in New England — and tried to send a message to a fellow ham in Springfield, Massachusetts, just 30 miles away. Nothing came back. He called again. Still nothing. Then he remembered a ham he knew in Windsor Locks, roughly halfway between the two cities, and asked him to carry the message the rest of the way.

Good morning, and keep one eye on the Sun today. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center still has a G2 (Moderate) geomagnetic storm watch in effect for tomorrow, October 9, with a coronal mass ejection that left the Sun on October 6 expected to arrive and push the Kp index to around 5.7 between 09 and 12 UTC. Right now the field is quiet -- observed Kp was near 2 this morning and the solar flux index sits at 113.7 -- so HF propagation is normal. But when that CME arrives, expect high-latitude fade on the HF bands, and aurora watchers should keep an eye out.

Long before a modern ham station, with its whisper-quiet transistors and waterfall displays, there was thunder. The earliest radio transmitters worked by discharging a capacitor across a spark gap, and every dot and dash went out into the air riding a crackling bolt of artificial lightning. That violent, beautiful noise was the heartbeat of amateur radio's first era, and it began with a young Italian experimenter who believed he could make electricity speak without wires.

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.