Contesting

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.

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.

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.

Tuesday opens with a geomagnetic storm watch in effect. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center expects mostly active conditions on October 13 and 14, with isolated G1 minor storming likely today as a coronal hole high-speed stream moves into a geoeffective position. A separate SWPC watch lists G1 as the highest level predicted for October 13, with no storm watch in effect for October 14, so HF operators should expect changeable high-latitude propagation and a chance of aurora at northern latitudes tonight.

The weekend of October 17 and 18 is shaping up as one of the busiest on-air weekends of the fall, with a major digital contest, a 160-meter classic, and a fresh DXpedition to a rare Atlantic entity all landing on the same two days. Here is what to line up in your shack this week.

The Sun gave radio operators a breather this weekend. NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center cancelled its G2 geomagnetic storm watch on October 11 — conditions no longer warranted it. This morning's 27-day outlook has the 10.7 cm solar flux at 120, the planetary A-index at 16, and the predicted Kp at 4. Sunday's observed flux was 122.

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.

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.

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.