American Radio Relay League | Ham Radio Association and Resources
The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) is the national association for amateur radio, connecting hams around the U.S. with news, information and resources.
[Updated 2018 November 13 @ 1024 UTC] Amateur Radio volunteers have been active or are standing by on several fronts as wildfires continue to rage in large sections of California.Â
Camp Fire
In Butte County, in Northern California, the Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest wildfire, triggered a call up of ARES members for communication support. A small wildfire that started in a mountainous area of Bu...
Amateur Radio operators associated with the Maritime Mobile Service Network (MMSN) played a significant part in summoning medical assistance on November 9 for a crew member suffering chest pains on board the 48-foot sailing vessel Marie Elena, some 300 miles east of Bermuda.
“The assistance we received from the ham radio operator[s] was crucial in helping us communicate with the vessel’s crew,” ...
Well-known contester and AR-Cluster developer Terry Gerdes, AB5K (ex-KX6OI), formerly of Texas, died on November 13 in Belize, where he had recently relocated and married. He was 69. An Arkansas native who was initially licensed as WB5SFA, Gerdes held a degree in electrical engineering from the University ofArkansas. In the 1980s, he operated from the MarshallIslands as KX6OI while tracking m...
Ocean County, New Jersey, Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES®) volunteers recently assisted search groups looking for a man with dementia who was reported missing on November 2 from a nursing home in Stafford Township. Searches concentrating on neighborhoods around the nursing home had been unsuccessful. The missing man’s family organized a search for November 10, and Ocean County ARES was i...
A new WSJT-X “release candidate,” version 2.0.0-rc4, now is available, and the version 2.0 Quick Start Guide has been revised and extended. The developers urge anyone upgrading to the new version to read the release notes thoroughly, since the upgrade requires users to change operator settings, so the software may not work “out of the box” when upgrading from previous versions.
ARRL Contest Branch Manager Bart Jahnke, W9JJ, says the 1,273 electronic logs plus 17 paper logs received by November 15 for this year’s ARRL November Sweepstakes CW weekend surpass last year’s log count by more than a dozen (the 7-daydeadline for electronic logs ended November 12, but paper logs postmarked by the deadlineare still arriving).
  Now it’s time for SS Phone. Jahnke stresses that ...
A SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle lifted off flawlessly at 2046 UTC on November 15 from Cape Canaveral, carrying the first Amateur Radio payload destined for geostationary orbit. About 32 minutes after launch, SpaceX reports the spacecraft was successfully deployed into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).
Positioned at 25.5° E, the satellite will carry an Amateur Radio S-band and X-band payload capab...
A single sunspot appeared on November 13-14, yielding a daily sunspot number of 11 over both days. The sunspot number increased to 13 on the following day, November 15. The average daily sunspot number for the reporting week (November 8-14) was 3.1, after no sunspots during the previous seven days.
Average daily solar flux rose from 67.7 to 68.5. Average daily planetary A index declined from 12...
R. Jan Carman, K5MA (ex-W5SBX, W3JXS), who was a member of the ARRL Headquarters staff from 2001 until 2003 died on November 13. An ARRL Life Member, he was 76.
Carman’s career spanned the fields of aerospace, oil-field equipment, industrial control and instrumentation, underwater acoustics, communication systems, manufacturing automation and consulting. Carman held bachelor’s and master’s degre...
Scott Neader, KA9FOX, is spearheading a GoFundMe effort to establish a scholarship to honor the memory of Paul Bittner, W0AIH (SK), who died as the result of a tower climbing mishap on October 31. He was 84. The memorial scholarship would be administered by the ARRL Foundation.
The GoFundMe solicitation says, “Licensed for nearly 70 years, Paul built one of the largest ham radio stations in the...
The FCC has granted, in part, the European Commission’s request for a waiver of Commission rules so that non-federal devices in the US may access specific signals transmitted from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) known as Galileo.
The action means that consumers and industry in the US may access certain satellite signals from the Galileo system to augment the US Global Positioning S...
Listen to the new episode of ARRL Audio News on your iOS or Android podcast app, or online at http://www.blubrry.com/arrlaudionews/. Audio News is also retransmitted on a number of FM repeaters. Click here and then scroll down to see the list.
ARRL has announced the results of contested elections for Director and Vice Director. Ballots were opened and counted on November 16 in seven contests within five ARRL Divisions.
Here are the final tabulations: Â
Central Division Director Â
Kermit Carlson, W9XA 1,898 Â
Valerie Hotzfeld, NV9L 1,755 Â
Mr. Carlson was declared elected. Â
Hudson Division Director  Ria Jairam, N2RJ 1,292  Mike Lisenco, ...
11/16/2018
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