13th February 2023 is the day UNESCO devotes to Radio, with the aim to enhance this mass media, simple and low cost, specifically suited to reach remote communities and vul­ner­a­ble people.

The motto of this year, "Radio and Peace", is especially significant for EURAO and radio amateurs, a subcategory within the Radio, who have the opportunity to carry around the world these values, all of them included in our "ham spirit".

Several members of EURAO organize special activities around this day.

Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) were busy the last week of January using amateur radio to make contact with two schools.

The Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS) program arranged contacts with Brentwood Magnet Elementary School in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Norwich Free Academy (NFA) located in Norwich, Connecticut.

On 26th January 2023, nearly 400 students at Brentwood Magnet Elementary School filled the gymnasium to listen to astronaut Koichi Wakata answer questions about his experience on the ISS. Wakata told students he loves being in space but is looking forward to taking a shower when he returns in March.

Surface mount components have been a game changer for the electronics hobbyist, but doing reflow soldering right requires some way to evenly heat the board. You might need to buy a commercial reflow oven — you can cobble one together from an old toaster oven, after all — but you still need something, because it’s not like a PCB is going to solder itself. Right?

Wrong. At least if you’re [Carl Bugeja], who came up with a clever way to make his PCBs self-soldering. The idea is to use one of the internal layers on a four-layer PCB, which would normally be devoted to a ground plane, as a built-in heating element. Rather than a broad, continuous layer of copper, [Carl] made a long, twisting trace covering the entire area of the PCB. Routing the trace around vias was a bit tricky, but in the end he managed a single trace with a resistance of about 3 ohms.