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.

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."