Nearly 1,000 QSOs Made From a 12,000-Year-Old Archaeological Site in Turkey

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.

A First for the Site

Archaeologists believe the wheel hadn't even been invented yet when the sanctuary at Karahantepe was carved into the bedrock almost 12,000 years ago, in what is now Turkey's Şanlıurfa province. The special event station, TC8KHT, marked the first ever amateur radio activation at the site since its creation around 9400 BC.

A team from the Turkish Amateur Radio Society (TRAC) was active from 18th to 20th September, operating from a location now carrying the Grid Square designation KM97PC — a spot that, in its original era, existed before writing, agriculture, or pottery had been invented. Operators worked CW, SSB, FT8/FT4, and the geostationary satellite QO-100. Anyone completing at least one contact qualifies for the free Amateur Radio Karahantepe Heritage Award.

Part of a Bigger Story

Karahantepe sits within Taş Tepeler — "Stone Mounds" in English — a network of prehistoric settlements centred around Şanlıurfa that's steadily building an international reputation, helped along by overseas exhibitions encouraging visitors to look beyond the more famous Göbeklitepe and explore the wider region.

Using the TC8KHT callsign, the team reached amateur operators around the world and used each contact as a chance to share a short introduction to Karahantepe's historical significance, pointing curious operators toward further information online.

TRAC Deputy Chairman Hudaverdi Gunes said the initiative had been in planning for about a year, as part of a broader push to raise international awareness of the site. Over the three days, the team worked their way through roughly 1,000 contacts across the globe, pairing the usual exchange of signal reports with a bit of impromptu archaeology outreach along the way.

Gunes noted that some of the stations contacted already knew of the site — including one German operator who said he'd followed both the planned activation and Karahantepe's history through German television coverage.

A genuinely unique way to blend two very different worlds: nearly 12,000 years of human history, and a hobby that's barely a century old.