ARRL News

The Dayton Amateur Radio Board of Directors has appointed Jack Gerbs, WB8SCT, of Springboro, Ohio, as the General Chairman for Hamvention® 2019. Gerbs, who served as Assistant General Chairman for the 2017 and 2018 Hamventions, succeeds Ron Cramer, KD8ENJ, who served in the post for the 2017 and 2018 shows.

“Jack worked very closely with me the last 2 years and is very familiar with all aspects ...

A crack team of contesters from Lithuania has won the gold medal in World Radiosport Team Championship 2018 (WRTC 2018), held over the weekend in Germany. Operating as Y81N, Gedas Lucinskas, LY9A, and Mindis Jukna, LY4L, topped the real-time scoreboard for much of the event, which is held as a competition within a contest in conjunction with the IARU HF Championship. Lucinskas and Jukna had end...

Amazon Prime Day is here! Deals started at 3 PM EDT (1900 UTC) today, July 16 and run through Tuesday, July 17. Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping days of the year. As you browse the great deals available exclusively to Amazon Prime members, we invite you to shop at AmazonSmile, choosing the ARRL as your charity of choice.

With every qualifying purchase you make through AmazonSmile, Amazon...

IARU Region 1 Emergency Coordinator Greg Mossup, G0DUB, has posted a report on the Emergency Communications Meeting held at June’s Ham Radio event in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Mossup said some 20 emergency communicators attended the June 1 meeting, sponsored by the IARU.

“After the introduction and Region 1 report, there were interesting presentations followed by a good exchange of information i...

As of Thursday, July 12, there have been no sunspots visible for 16 days consecutively.

Spaceweather.com pointed out that to find an equally long stretch of no sunspots, we must look back to November 2009 when we were emerging from the deepest solar minimum in a century. At the lowest of the low activity in 2008, the sun was blank for 52 consecutive days, they reported, and that seems to be from...

WRTC 2018 organizers today officially announced the list of call signs to be used during the World Radiosport Team Championship 2018 (WRTC 2018) competition that gets under way at 1200 UTC on Saturday, July 14. The call signs to be used will be Y81A through Y89U.

Y##-prefix call signs, once used by radio amateurs in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were inherited by the Germa...

[UPDATED 2018-07-12 @ 1937 UTC -- This story corrects some incorrect statements included in an earlier post.]

A California man embroiled in a long-running license renewal proceeding has lost the next step in his fight to remain a radio amateur. In a July 9 Order, FCC Administrative Law Judge Richard L. Sippel terminated the decade-old license renewal application of William Crowell, W6WBJ (ex-N6A...

The ARRL Contest Branch has announced that some contest award certificates now are available for download from the ARRL website in PDF and JPEG formats. Just enter the call sign. 

ARRL Contest Branch Manager Bart Jahnke, W9JJ, credited “the extraordinary efforts of Bruce Horn, WA7BNM, together with Trey Garlough, N5KO; Ward Silver, N0AX, and the ARRL IT team,” for making this a reality.

Currently...

“Mailbag” is the topic of the current (July 5) episode of the “ARRL The Doctor is In” podcast. Listen...and learn!

Sponsored by DX Engineering, “ARRL The Doctor is In” is an informative discussion of all things technical. Listen on your computer, tablet, or smartphone -- whenever and wherever you like!

Every 2 weeks, your host, QST Editor-in-Chief Steve Ford, WB8IMY, and the Doctor himself, Joel ...

The winning article for the July 2018 QST Cover Plaque award is “An Antenna for 630 to 10 Meters” by Markus Hansen, VE7CA. The QST Cover Plaque Award -- given to the author or authors of the most popular article in each issue -- is determined by a vote of ARRL members on the QST Cover Plaque Poll web page. Cast a ballot for your favorite article in the August issue today.

Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC) has reiterated a call to Canadian radio amateurs to keep a close watch on Hurricane Chris. The storm was just upgraded from Tropical Storm to hurricane status and has gained considerable forward motion as it bears down on the Canadian Maritimes and Newfoundland-Labrador with winds of 155 kilometers per hour (100 MPH).

The storm is moving to the northeast at 37 kilo...

An ARRL VEC Volunteer Examiner (VE) team in Bankstown, New South Wales, Australia, conducted the first Technician test session under the new Element 2 Question Pool that went into effect on July 1. The newly revised pool, released in January 2018 (and subsequently updated and re-released in February) by the Question Pool Committee (QPC) of the National Conference of Volunteer Examiner Coordinat...