The ham radio Olympics got a new winner — three years after the fact. The WRTC Sanctioning Committee has disqualified the original winner of WRTC 2022, held in Italy in 2023, after an expanded cheating investigation. The I44W team, UW7LL and VE3DZ, deliberately revealed its identity through pre-contest frequency handoffs, and 21 pirated callsigns made fraudulent multiplier-enhancing contacts that disproportionately benefited that team and the ninth-place I43Z team, RW7K and RA9P. The 2026 WRTC Judging Committee exposed the scheme with new detection methods applied retroactively to the 2023 logs. Contacts with the pirated calls were removed from every log without penalty. The revised standings name I43C, DJ5MW and DL1IAO, as the new champion, with I49D, 9A7DX and 9A3LG, second and I47M, F8DBF and F1AKK, third.
The first hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic season has come ashore. Isaias made landfall near Destin, Florida, at about 8:30 p.m. Central time Friday as a strong Category 2 with 105 mph winds, and by this morning had weakened to a post-tropical cyclone moving north near Montgomery, Alabama. Over 450,000 Florida customers and 297,000 in Alabama lost power. The National Hurricane Center has dropped all watches and warnings, but flash-flood risk continues and the tornado threat lingers across the Florida Panhandle, Georgia, and the Carolinas today. The Hurricane Watch Net was active on 14.325 and 7.268 MHz during Friday's landfall, and emcomm operators across the Southeast are worth monitoring as recovery begins.
The 44th AMSAT Space Symposium and Annual Meeting wraps up in Jacksonville, Florida today, with presentations streamed online over the past two days. Fresh hardware is on the air: AMSAT-DL's ERMINAZ-2 PocketQube trio rode Transporter-18 to orbit on October 1, and AMSAT-EA's UNNE-1B, also known as HADES-E2, and HADES-L were deployed October 3. HADES-E2 carries an FM voice and FSK digital repeater with a downlink on 436.888 MHz and an uplink on 145.925 MHz, plus a CW beacon, with a student telemetry guessing game from Universidad de Nebrija. Tomorrow the Deep Space Exploration Society holds its 11th annual open house at the Plishner Radio Telescope Site outside Haswell, Colorado, where visitors can hear their own voices bounced off the Moon on 1296 MHz, with club station KØPRT active on HF and VHF.
The weekend contest slate is loaded: the Oceania DX Contest on CW and the Scandinavian Activity Contest on SSB headline, alongside the Arizona, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota QSO parties, the Makrothen RTTY Contest, the SKCC Weekend Sprintathon, and the PODXS 070 Club 160m Great Pumpkin Sprint. Hamfest Chattanooga runs October 16–17 in Ringgold, Georgia with ARRL-sanctioned FCC testing, the ARRL Online Auction opens October 16 with preview starting October 13 to benefit ARRL education programs, and the one-day Zero Retries Digital Conference lands in San Ramon, California on October 16. ARRL On the Air LIVE hosts a contesting-for-beginners session October 27 with Wayne Greene, KB4DSF.
DXers have plenty to chase: 5W0AF in Samoa runs through October 12, 6O2M in Somalia through the 25th, and 9T0MD in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on 160 through 6 meters plus QO-100 and moonbounce, through October 11. Today is the last day for 8Q7JH in the Maldives and V51WH/V55Y in Namibia, while VK9WX on Willis Island runs through month's end and the Polish Arctic station HF0PAS is on 40-meter SSB split. Space weather keeps things interesting: the solar flux index is holding around 120, and SWPC issued a fresh G2 moderate storm watch for October 11, with aurora possible as far south as New York, Wisconsin, and Washington, plus some higher-latitude HF fading. Check the bands, work the contests, and have a great weekend.