Six Satellites, Three Continents: AMSAT Organisations Make Their Mark on Transporter-18

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Six Satellites, Three Continents: AMSAT Organisations Make Their Mark on Transporter-18

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.

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Ten Minutes That Made History: Chile's First Direct ARISS Contact With a Public School

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Ten Minutes That Made History: Chile's First Direct ARISS Contact With a Public School

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.

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Commercial AM and FM Station Counts Keep Sliding, Latest FCC Totals Show

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Commercial AM and FM Station Counts Keep Sliding, Latest FCC Totals Show

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.

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