ARRL has announced the results of contested elections for Director and Vice Director. Ballots were opened and counted on November 16 in seven contests within five ARRL Divisions.

Here are the final tabulations:  

Central Division Director  

Kermit Carlson, W9XA 1,898  

Valerie Hotzfeld, NV9L 1,755  

Mr. Carlson was declared elected.  

Hudson Division Director  

Ria Jairam, N2RJ 1,292   Mike Lisenco, N...

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The FCC has granted, in part, the European Commission’s request for a waiver of Commission rules so that non-federal devices in the US may access specific signals transmitted from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) known as Galileo.

The action means that consumers and industry in the US may access certain satellite signals from the Galileo system to augment the US Global Positioning S...

Scott Neader, KA9FOX, is spearheading a GoFundMe effort to establish a scholarship to honor the memory of Paul Bittner, W0AIH (SK), who died as the result of a tower climbing mishap on October 31. He was 84. The memorial scholarship would be administered by the ARRL Foundation.

The GoFundMe solicitation says, “Licensed for nearly 70 years, Paul built one of the largest ham radio stations in the...

R. Jan Carman, K5MA (ex-W5SBX, W3JXS), who was a member of the ARRL Headquarters staff from 2001 until 2003 died on November 13. An ARRL Life Member, he was 76.

Carman’s career spanned the fields of aerospace, oil-field equipment, industrial control and instrumentation, underwater acoustics, communication systems, manufacturing automation and consulting. Carman held bachelor’s and master’s degre...

A single sunspot appeared on November 13-14, yielding a daily sunspot number of 11 over both days. The sunspot number increased to 13 on the following day, November 15. The average daily sunspot number for the reporting week (November 8-14) was 3.1, after no sunspots during the previous seven days.

Average daily solar flux rose from 67.7 to 68.5.  Average daily planetary A index declined from 12...

A SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle lifted off flawlessly at 2046 UTC on November 15 from Cape Canaveral, carrying the first Amateur Radio payload destined for geostationary orbit. About 32 minutes after launch, SpaceX reports the spacecraft was successfully deployed into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).

Positioned at 25.5° E, the satellite will carry an Amateur Radio S-band and X-band payload capab...

ARRL Contest Branch Manager Bart Jahnke, W9JJ, says the 1,273 electronic logs plus 17 paper logs received by November 15 for this year’s ARRL November Sweepstakes CW weekend surpass last year’s log count by more than a dozen (the 7-day deadline for electronic logs ended November 12, but paper logs postmarked by the deadline are still arriving).

  Now it’s time for SS Phone. Jahnke stresses that ...

A new WSJT-X “release candidate,” version 2.0.0-rc4, now is available, and the version 2.0 Quick Start Guide has been revised and extended. The developers urge anyone upgrading to the new version to read the release notes thoroughly, since the upgrade requires users to change operator settings, so the software may not work “out of the box” when upgrading from previous versions.

The latest versi...

Ocean County, New Jersey, Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES®) volunteers recently assisted search groups looking for a man with dementia who was reported missing on November 2 from a nursing home in Stafford Township. Searches concentrating on neighborhoods around the nursing home had been unsuccessful. The missing man’s family organized a search for November 10, and Ocean County ARES was i...

Well-known contester and AR-Cluster developer Terry Gerdes, AB5K (ex-KX6OI), formerly of Texas, died on November 13 in Belize, where he had recently relocated and married. He was 69. An Arkansas native who was initially licensed as WB5SFA, Gerdes held a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Arkansas. In the 1980s, he operated from the Marshall Islands as KX6OI while tracking m...

Well-known contester and PacketCluster developer Terry Gerdes, AB5K (ex-KX6OI), formerly of Texas, died on November 13 in Belize, where he had recently relocated and married. He was 69. An Arkansas native who was initially licensed as WB5SFA, Gerdes held a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Arkansas. In the 1980s, he operated from the Marshall Islands as KX6OI while trackin...

Amateur Radio operators associated with the Maritime Mobile Service Network (MMSN) played a significant part in summoning medical assistance on November 9 for a crew member suffering chest pains on board the 48-foot sailing vessel Marie Elena, some 300 miles east of Bermuda.

“The assistance we received from the ham radio operator[s] was crucial in helping us communicate with the vessel’s crew,” ...

[Updated 2018 November 13 @ 1024 UTC] Amateur Radio volunteers have been active or are standing by on several fronts as wildfires continue to rage in large sections of California. 

Camp Fire

In Butte County, in Northern California, the Camp Fire, the state’s deadliest wildfire, triggered a call up of ARES members for communication support. A small wildfire that started in a mountainous area of Bu...

As part of the run up to World Radiocommunication Conference 2019 (WRC-19), three International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) Study Group 5 (SG 5) Working Groups have been meeting this week in Geneva. ITU-R Study Groups develop the technical bases for decisions taken at WRCs and develop global standards, reports, and handbooks on radiocommunication matters. Working G...

Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC) reports its Corporate Secretary Sukwan Widajat, VA3WID/YB0SWI/AB1XM, has died while in Indonesia, a post he had held since 2015. RAC President Glen MacDonell, VA3XRA, said he always appreciated Widajat’s enthusiasm, eagerness, and helpful recommendations. “We are all volunteers and know that people have other responsibilities, and he was an example of balancing th...

According to AMSAT-Germany (AMSAT-DL), Es’hail-2, the world’s first geostationary satellite carrying Amateur Radio transponders, will go into space from Cape Canaveral in a few days. Space news outlet Spaceflight Now says that the SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher is set to launch on Thursday, November 15, between 2049 and 2229 UTC. Positioned at 25.5° E, the satellite will carry an Amateur Radio S-band...