YOTA Month is Well Underway in the UK

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Youngsters on the Air Month is well underway with multiple groups scheduled to host special event station GB25YOTA this week.

On Sunday 7 December, you’ll be able to work operators from Cray Valley Radio Society, as well as the 2nd Marlborough Scouts. The Scout group will also be active tomorrow, Monday 8 December. Buckie High School in Scotland will be operating on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday so listen out and encourage young operators in making what could be their first ever QSO.

On Tuesday 9 December, Hilderstone Radio Society members will be supervising students from St Peters-In-Thanet Junior School. On Wednesday 10 December, students from Sunderland College will be on the amateur bands with supervision from Ian Bowman, G7ESY. Looking ahead to next weekend, the RSGB National Radio Centre will be welcoming young people to operate as GB25YOTA.

Details of operating times, bands and modes can be found at http://www.rsgb.org/yota-month

Happy 12th Birthday to AO-73 (FUNcube-1)

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Happy 12th Birthday to AO-73 (FUNcube-1)

AO-73 celebrated its 12th birthday on 21 November 2025. The satellite is still operating well in full-time transponder mode.

On 21 November 2013, FUNcube-1 (AO-73) was launched from the Yasny launch base located in the Orenburg Region, Russia, on a Dnepr Launch Vehicle into a 600 km, 97.8º inclination sun-synchronous orbit. In this orbit, the satellite passes over the British Isles and Europe approximately 3 times in the morning, and 3 times in the evening, every day, perhaps allowing the morning passes to be used for educational purposes and the evening passes for Amateur Radio communications.

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Neural Codec Called 'Milestone' for Digital Voice

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It's being heralded as a milestone in the long-overdue evolution of speech quality for land-mobile radio systems - the use of an adaptive neural network that replaces traditional signal processing.

A digital voice milestone was announced at the recent acoustics and speech conference in California, where the Free DV Project's David Rowe, VK5DGR, co-presented a paper describing a neural network that replaces traditional signal processing with machine learning.

“the first known real-world deployment of a neural codec – an important milestone that the Ham community can be proud of.”
— Free DV Project's David Rowe, VK5DGR

Rowe and programmer Jean-Marc Valin presented the details to attendees at the IEEE Signal Processing Society conference, where David said it was well-received.

“provides unprecedented speech quality and robustness for VHF/UHF land mobile radio applications.”
— David Rowe, VK5DGR

Instead of using the fixed algorithms of traditional digital voice, the FreeDV Radio Encoder, known as RADE V1, employs fully adaptive machine learning to produce a higher-quality result, developed using open-source software.

The FreeDV Project - https://freedv.org/