Public Service

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.

On October 16 through 18, some of the busiest operators on the amateur bands will not be seasoned DXers — they will be kids. Jamboree on the Air (JOTA), the largest annual Scouting event in the world, returns for its 2026 run, linking millions of Scouts and Guides across more than 150 countries by radio and the internet (as JOTI, the Jamboree on the Internet).

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.

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.