Rideshare launches have become one of the easiest ways for the amateur satellite community to get hardware into orbit, and Transporter-18 just delivered one of the strongest showings yet.

Six satellites from three AMSAT organisations reached orbit following the launch of SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on 1st October. The international lineup included three ERMINAZ-2 PocketQubes from AMSAT-DL in Germany, HADES-L and UNNE-1B from AMSAT-EA in Spain, and SanoSat-2 from AMSAT Nepal. The spacecraft rode aboard OSSIE-D, the first orbital transfer vehicle developed by Spanish space transportation company UARX Space, which began deploying its payload of small satellites after separating from the Falcon 9 upper stage.

Some milestones only last minutes, but the impact sticks around a lot longer. This is one of those stories.

Chile has just marked its first-ever direct amateur radio contact between a public school and the International Space Station — a moment that lasted exactly 10 minutes, but one the students involved are unlikely to forget any time soon.

The broadcast landscape keeps quietly shrinking on the commercial side, according to the latest FCC licensing figures — while noncommercial FM keeps doing the opposite.

In the FCC's latest totals, dated 30th September, commercial AM stations dropped to 4,258 — down 42 from last quarter, and a decline of 142 signals overall since September 2024.

Commercial FM stations continued their own downswing too, falling by 20 to 6,540. Ten of those cancellations came from a single owner, Hispanic Target Media, which surrendered ten FM licenses outright. This marks the seventh consecutive quarter of modest declines for commercial FM, a category that peaked back in December 2019.

If you want to see the longer-term trend for yourself, there's a 10-year interactive breakdown of station counts built directly from FCC data.

If you like your amateur radio with a bit of a cardio workout attached, mark the calendar: the RaDAR Rally returns on Saturday 7th November 2026.

RaDAR — Rapid Deployment Amateur Radio — is exactly what it sounds like: a fast-paced, genuinely challenging outdoor activity where you set up a portable station, make five contacts, pack everything back down, and move to a new location — repeating that whole cycle as many times as you can within a four-hour window.

Some stories in this hobby connect you straight back to the earliest days of radio — this is one of them.

When United Nations Day is marked on 24th October, a message will go out to the world via a VLF frequency transmitted from Sweden. Inside the Grimeton Radio Station, the historic Alexanderson alternator — more than a century old — will be tuned to 17.2 kHz, where it will transmit in CW, under the callsign SAQ, words promoting "peace, unity and global partnerships."

If you've been eyeing up APRS Connect since its Android debut back in August, the wait's over: it's now live on the App Store for iPhone.

APRS Connect, the messaging-first APRS client that launched on Android in August, is now available for iOS 16.4 and later. It's free to install and use over APRS-IS. Connecting a physical radio, along with a handful of advanced features, sits behind APRS Connect Pro, a subscription that comes with a 7-day free trial.

Every so often a mode comes along that genuinely threatens to reshape how we talk on HF. Fifty years ago, that mode was single sideband, which overtook AM as the dominant voice mode largely because it packed a signal into roughly half the bandwidth. Now there's a new contender aiming to do the same thing all over again.

FreeDV has introduced a new digital voice mode called RADE — short for Radio Autoencoder — which occupies half the bandwidth of an SSB signal, while reportedly delivering more natural-sounding speech than earlier digital voice modes have managed.

Getting young people into amateur radio often comes down to having the right support network behind a school club — and the Azores has just built exactly that.

It's already been a busy year for school amateur radio clubs in Portugal, and particularly in the Azores, where clubs have recently started coordinating joint activities and sharing knowledge through a newly formed group known as RERA.

Spectrum congestion isn't just an amateur radio problem — it's now a public safety one, according to two of the United Nations' leading technical agencies.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) have called on governments to introduce tougher protections against radio spectrum interference, warning that the same frequencies used to monitor climate, forecast weather, and deliver early warning messages are increasingly being crowded out by satellite and wireless systems.

Every POTA or SOTA activator knows a session can throw up surprises. Few, though, turn into a genuine emergency response.

Michael Miller, KH6ML, had just logged his 11th QSO during a POTA/SOTA activation on 16th September at Hawaii's Diamond Head when his 12th contact of the day happened right there on the summit — not over the air, but in person. A visitor approached him for help: a woman had collapsed inside the summit's observation bunker after hiking the trail.

Good manners on the air never go out of style, and now there's a net dedicated to making sure they don't. Time to brush up on your on-air etiquette — and your general manners — because a new net has launched with exactly that in mind.

The Sunflower GAPT Net does a bit of both things its name promises. Launched by the Sunflower Linked System, the net lives up to its title: Good Amateur Practice and Trivia — GAPT for short. Net control duties fall to Daryl Stout, NK5LA.

There's something wonderfully incongruous about a modern HF rig calling CQ from a site that predates the wheel. That's exactly what just happened in southeastern Turkey.

Amateur radio operators broadcasting from Karahantepe — part of the Taş Tepeler Neolithic network, pronounced "carra-hon-TEP-pay" — connected with nearly 1,000 stations across 40 countries during a three-day operation aimed at putting the ancient site on the global map.