The National Institute of Standards and Technologies has its fingers in many different pies. The electronics buffs among us know them for their work in electronics standards, such as voltage standards, and the WWVx time and frequency standards stations.

In addition to these activities, amateur radio operators should also know about their work with emergency communications. A recent blog post, “Mission Critical Voice Communications: Your Life May Depend on It!” discusses some of the latest work being done by the Public Safety Communications Research division (PSCR) in Boulder, Colorado.

As I’m sure most of you know, Field Day is this coming weekend. I often describe Field Day as a combination emergency preparedness exercise/club event/PR opportunity. Indeed, you score points by sending out a press release to local news outlets.

Increasingly, I find that many of these press releases are being picked up and reported on. Here’s a sampling of the stories I’ve found over the last week or so:

A couple of days ago, I managed to work the OJ0AW on Market Reef on 30m. Market Reef is a small piece of rock in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland.

This is Market Reef’s 50th year as a DXCC entity and, so I’ve read, many DXpeditions will be made to this piece of rock in 2019. So, if you don’t already have it in your logs, now’s the time.

I worked OJ0AW on 30m after calling for only about five minutes. Good thing, too, given my short attention span. :)