Every POTA or SOTA activator knows a session can throw up surprises. Few, though, turn into a genuine emergency response.

Michael Miller, KH6ML, had just logged his 11th QSO during a POTA/SOTA activation on 16th September at Hawaii's Diamond Head when his 12th contact of the day happened right there on the summit — not over the air, but in person. A visitor approached him for help: a woman had collapsed inside the summit's observation bunker after hiking the trail.

Good manners on the air never go out of style, and now there's a net dedicated to making sure they don't. Time to brush up on your on-air etiquette — and your general manners — because a new net has launched with exactly that in mind.

The Sunflower GAPT Net does a bit of both things its name promises. Launched by the Sunflower Linked System, the net lives up to its title: Good Amateur Practice and Trivia — GAPT for short. Net control duties fall to Daryl Stout, NK5LA.

There's something wonderfully incongruous about a modern HF rig calling CQ from a site that predates the wheel. That's exactly what just happened in southeastern Turkey.

Amateur radio operators broadcasting from Karahantepe — part of the Taş Tepeler Neolithic network, pronounced "carra-hon-TEP-pay" — connected with nearly 1,000 stations across 40 countries during a three-day operation aimed at putting the ancient site on the global map.