DX

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.

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.

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.