GMRS

The week opens with students on the air and closes with the biggest contest weekend of the fall. The ARRL School Club Roundup runs Monday through Friday, October 19 to 23, from 1300 UTC Monday to 2359 UTC Friday, with elementary, middle, high school and college clubs working each other and the rest of us, so listen for fresh school calls all week.

Sunday, October 18, 2026, opens with good news from orbit. Today's AMSAT News Service bulletin, ANS-291, reports that two student-built CubeSats are now aboard the International Space Station after launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on October 13 as part of NASA's 35th commercial resupply mission. PROVES-Maia, from Texas State University, will relay digital messages for radio operators over UHF and S-band and evaluate intersatellite routing, while PROVES-Taygeta, from Cal Poly Pomona and Mt.

GMRS began with a dream of radio for everyone. After World War II, inventor Al Gross demonstrated a pocket-sized UHF radio, and FCC Commissioner E. K. Jett championed a citizens radio service that would work almost like a telephone, quiet until someone called you. On April 10, 1947, the FCC created that service in the 460 to 470 MHz band and called it Class A Citizens Radio Service. The early gear was tube-type, limited to 60 watts of plate input power to the final amplifier tube, and it ran wideband FM with 50 kilohertz channel spacing.

The weekend of October 17 and 18 is shaping up as one of the busiest on-air weekends of the fall, with a major digital contest, a 160-meter classic, and a fresh DXpedition to a rare Atlantic entity all landing on the same two days. Here is what to line up in your shack this week.

Good news for Arizona GMRS operators: four Southwest Community Radio System repeaters are now open to any licensed GMRS operator, no membership required. Heliograph 700, Guthrie 600, Alpine 725, and Nutrioso 550 — all listed on myGMRS with their frequencies, tones, and coverage details — welcome any valid GMRS licensee in range. Just key up, identify with your callsign, and keep it courteous.

The biggest radio-regulatory story of the week landed in Washington on Wednesday. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr published the agenda for the Commission's October 29 open meeting, and two items touch the spectrum world we live in every day. The Commission will vote on advancing a new spectrum auction for direct-to-device satellite services — the technology linking ordinary smartphones straight to satellites — and on finalizing rules to open roughly 50 MHz of low-band spectrum, including the 800 MHz cellular band, for commercial drone operations.

Your GMRS radio may one day send its location — and a short text — on its own. That is the future an Australian radio maker is asking the FCC to bless, and the Commission is listening.

Ask most GMRS users where their service came from and you will get a shrug. But the General Mobile Radio Service is one of the oldest radio services the FCC ever created — older than CB, older than FRS, and nearly as old as amateur radio licensing itself.

Hurricane Isaias is coming ashore tonight. The storm that formed in the Gulf of Mexico on October 7 strengthened into a hurricane within 20 hours, becoming the first hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic season, and is expected to make landfall late tonight or early Saturday along the northern Gulf Coast, likely as a Category 1 or 2. Hurricane warnings stretch from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to the Bay/Gulf County line in Florida. NHC Director Mike Brennan calls storm surge the deadliest threat: five to seven feet from Ocean Springs to Indian Pass and in Mobile Bay, arriving after dark.