Pennsylvania Hams Step Up for the Red Cross

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Pennsylvania Hams Step Up for the Red Cross

Every busy events season tests the same weak point: what happens when tens of thousands of phones try to hit the same cell tower at once. This summer in southeastern Pennsylvania, the answer came down to amateur radio.

It's been a packed calendar of sports fixtures, celebrations, and large public gatherings across the region, and the American Red Cross Southeastern Pennsylvania disaster response team found itself calling on more local hams than ever to help keep communications solid throughout. The Philadelphia Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) was there as always, but this time the Red Cross widened the net — and hams from Delaware, Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks counties answered the call alongside them. On top of that, the effort got a further boost from members of the Red Cross's own Disaster Services Technology team, led by Cliff Hotchkiss, KC3PGT.

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NASA's PUNCH Mission Cracks Solar Storm Forecasting

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NASA's PUNCH Mission Cracks Solar Storm Forecasting

If you've ever had a band go strange on you with no warning, or watched propagation fall off a cliff mid-QSO, you'll appreciate why this next story matters to radio amateurs specifically, not just space nerds.

NASA launched its PUNCH mission — the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere — back in March 2025, with the goal of getting a much better handle on solar weather. It's a constellation of four microsatellites watching the Sun around the clock, and almost as soon as they reached orbit they started capturing images of coronal mass ejections (CMEs): the huge, explosive bursts of solar material flung out into space that, when they strike Earth's magnetic field, kick off solar storms.

Now the PUNCH team has used that imagery to show just how much of a leap forward the mission represents for forecasting.

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POTA Pulls the Plug on 85% of French Parks — And a Volunteer Resigns Over It

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Parks on the Air has become one of the biggest growth stories in amateur radio over the last few years, but this August it found itself at the centre of a row that's got a fair chunk of the community talking.

In August 2026, the POTA board removed roughly 85% of France's park references from its database, ruling that the locations — largely ZNIEFF ecological zones — didn't meet the programme's global criteria for state or federal public land. The fallout was immediate: France's POTA mapping representative resigned in the wake of the mass deletion. [source]

What Triggered the Purge

  • Eligibility mismatch — The French team had built out references using ZNIEFF areas, a French ecological zoning designation that often includes private property or land without guaranteed public access, which put them at odds with POTA's usual qualifying standards.

  • Global standards, no exceptions — The POTA board's position was that references failing to meet the programme's standard criteria for public park infrastructure couldn't be grandfathered in indefinitely.

  • A communication breakdown — Volunteers say they heard little from the central organisation before the references were pulled en masse, which did nothing to soften the blow.

It's the kind of story that touches a nerve well beyond France — anyone who's put time into building out park references for POTA will recognise the frustration of watching that work disappear with little warning.

POTA Board’s Response - https://q5hamradio.substack.com/p/parks-on-the-air-board-statement?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2171283&post_id=211481288&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=6dhmia&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email