Emergency Communications

Monday, October 19, 2026, opens a busy week on the bands, led by the ARRL School Club Roundup. The fall session runs October 19 through 23, beginning at 1300 UTC Monday and ending at 2359 UTC Friday. School clubs from elementary school through university exchange contact information with each other and with any other station, and individuals and non-school clubs are encouraged to take part. A station may operate no more than six hours in any 24 hours and 24 hours total, so give young operators a contact when you hear them.

Saturday is the heart of Jamboree on the Air and Jamboree on the Internet, running October 16 to 18 under the theme A Peaceful and Inclusive World, and Scouts are on the air today. At Pacificon in San Ramon, California, the Golden Gate Area Council and the Mount Diablo Amateur Radio Club are running a JOTA-JOTI station at the San Ramon Marriott from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. today, while Pacificon, the ARRL Pacific Division Convention, is in its second day. Across the country, Hamfest Chattanooga wraps up today, October 17, from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

When Hurricane Katrina came ashore on August 29, 2005, near Buras, Louisiana, as a Category 3 storm with winds near 125 miles per hour, it knocked out power, telephones and much of the Gulf Coast's ordinary communications. In Hancock County, Mississippi, the county had lost contact with the outside world except through amateur radio operators, who stepped in as 911 dispatchers and relayed messages in and out. It was dramatic, but it was not improvised from nothing.

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 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.

In April of 1917, as the United States entered the First World War, every amateur radio operator in the country received the same grim letter from the Department of Commerce: get off the air and dismantle your antennas. More than six thousand hams, at the height of the spark era, fell silent almost overnight. The American Radio Relay League, formally organized that very year, suddenly had nothing to relay — so it did the next most useful thing it could think of: it recruited its members into the nation's communications services.

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.

Tropical Storm Isaias is the story every ham along the Gulf Coast should be watching. The National Hurricane Center named the storm early Wednesday in the Bay of Campeche, and forecasters expect it to become the first hurricane of the 2026 Atlantic season by Thursday, strengthening to a Category 2 with 109-mph winds before a Friday landfall along the northern Gulf Coast. A hurricane watch runs from Bay St.