ARRL

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.

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.