The spring 2021 Red Cross Nationwide Emergency Communications Winlink Drill will be held on May 8, which is World Red Cross and Red Crescent Day 2021. Details and instructions are available. Sign up for email updates. A

head of the May nationwide exercise, the American Red Cross (ARC) Emergency Communications training group will continue its Winlink Thursdays training sessions on March 11 and Ap...

With the former Voice of America Delano relay site in Central California scheduled for eventual demolition for resale, the Collins Collectors Association (CCA), in association with the Antique Wireless Association (AWA), came up with a plan in 2014 (working, among others, with past ARRL Midwestern Division Director Rod Blocksome, K0DAS, a former Collins engineer), to retrieve one of the Collins...

Wyoming and southern Montana hams belonging to the north Yellowstone Amateur Radio Club and Park County Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES®) took to the wilderness in late January during heavy snow to take part in an emergency preparedness exercise. The groups have about 15 members in all; many more bison and elk roam the roads than do hams.

The critical winter duty for North Yellowstone radi...

Josh Tanner, the Australian filmmaker who produced the thriller Decommissioned by Perception Pictures, has explained how he came up with the idea to develop the movie short. In the approximately 6-minute film, SuitSat returns in the future to haunt International Space Station commander “Diaz,” played by Joey Vieira, who spots SuitSat, the surplus Russian Orlan spacesuit that was turned into an...

An article describing how radio amateurs can help fill the information “donut hole” by providing post-earthquake “did you feel it” (DYFI) reports via Winlink HF radio email appeared on February 22 in the American Geophysical Union (AGU) magazine Eos. As the article points out, “Ham radio networks gear up to provide real-time, on-the-ground information about earthquake shaking and damage when ot...

The amateur radio communications team of the Florida Baptist Disaster Relief has created a multi-site radio communications exercise dubbed “Whirlwind Boom,” designed to bring together volunteers and local agencies across northern Florida and throughout the southeastern US. The 2-hour drill is set for Friday, March 19. Invitations have gone out to Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES®) groups,...

ARRL Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES®) and American Red Cross volunteers joined forces in Texas under the ARRL/Red Cross memorandum of understanding in responding to the situation resulting from unseasonably frigid weather. Kevin McCoy, KF5FUZ, said the Red Cross formally requested an ARES activation in Texas to address the effects of the natural disaster, which included a lack of drinkin...

ARRL Life Member Ulrich Rohde, N1UL, has donated a Rohde & Schwarz SMBV100A vector signal generator to the ARRL Laboratory. The device offers internal signal generation for all major digital radio standards. “That is absolutely fabulous news and extremely generous,” ARRL CEO David Minster, NA2AA, told Rohde.

ARRL Laboratory Manager Ed Hare, W1RFI, said the instrument will be a valuable addition...

As reported on Spaceweather.com, Canadian radio amateur Scott Tilley, VE7TIL, has snagged another signal from deep space. His latest conquest has been to copy the signal from China’s Tianwen-1 (pronounced “tee-EN-ven”) probe, which went into orbit around Mars on February 10. Tilley told Spaceweather.com that the probe’s X-band signal was “loud and audible.”

“It was a treasure hunt,” Tilley told...

At its Annual Meeting in January, the ARRL Board of Directors considered a motion to offer a new service that would pay the new but not-yet-implemented $35 FCC application fee for a limited number of new radio amateurs younger than age 18 who, at the time of testing, belonged to an ARRL Affiliated 501(c)(3) charitable organization and passed their tests through an ARRL VEC-sponsored exam sessio...