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WEEKEND EDITION: I just lit a fire in the stove, same as yesterday- 59 degrees on Memorial Day Weekend, and don't wish any veterans "Happy" Memorial Day...

EMAIL: Hi Jon,

Signals Without Borders

By Michael Kalter (W8CI) Xenia, Ohio

Hamvention 2026 drew a world of kindred spirits to the Greene County Fairgrounds — and reminded us that radio waves have always been humanity's most quietly miraculous language.

At a Glance

• Attendees: 30,000+ (official count pending)
• Countries represented: 43+
• Volunteers: 600+

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It is finished — and already missed. The 74th annual Dayton Hamvention, held at the Greene County Fair and Expo Center in Xenia, Ohio, came to a close this past weekend, leaving behind a fairground full of memories, friendships renewed and forged, and a quiet sense of awe at just how far a radio signal can travel.

From the moment the gates opened on Friday morning, it was clear this year's gathering was something special. Crowds poured in from across the United States and more than 43 countries around the world — engineers and experimenters, retired servicemen and curious teenagers, seasoned DX chasers and brand-new licensees. Every walk of life. Every mode of communication. All converging on a single fairground in Greene County, Ohio, united by one invisible thread: the radio wave.

It doesn’t matter where you’re from — we can still have fun, talk on the radio, talk around the world, and just be friends. — Hazel Everetts, Assistant General Chairperson, Hamvention 2026

A gathering unlike any other

Hamvention is often called the world’s largest amateur radio convention, and the numbers bear that out. Thousands of attendees filled the exhibit halls, forums, and the sprawling flea market tucked inside the fairground’s horse track infield — with official final attendance figures still being tallied at the time of this writing. Over 350 vendor booths offered everything from brand-new transceivers to decades-old components, with 162 vendors representing the full spectrum of the hobby.

But statistics tell only part of the story. Walk through any aisle of the flea market, sit in on any forum, and you quickly understand that Hamvention is less about equipment and more about people. Friendships maintained year after year over the same crowded tables. Mentors passing knowledge to newcomers who didn’t know, six months ago, what a feedline was. Young operators discovering that this hobby has no ceiling.

Hamvention is the annual pinnacle event of our hobby. It is an honor to work with a great team to make this a successful event. Each year we work on improving the event. It takes a team of dedicated volunteers who share the passion and love of Amateur Radio. I encourage everyone that loves this hobby to get involved! — Jack Gerbs, WB8SCT · Hamvention 2026 Executive Committee

The next generation takes the stage

Among the most inspiring moments of the entire weekend was the Radio Club of America Youth Forum — a Saturday morning tradition that has run for more than three decades, and one that never fails to silence a room full of seasoned operators with nothing more than the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old at a microphone.

Founded and guided for many years by legendary amateur radio educator Carole Perry, WB2MGP — a Fellow and Director of the Radio Club of America, past Hamvention Ham of the Year, and ARRL Instructor of the Year — the RCA Youth Forum brought together carefully selected young ham radio operators, some barely out of elementary school, to deliver polished and passionate presentations on their work within the hobby. Topics ranged across the full breadth of amateur radio: satellite communications, high-altitude ballooning, antenna construction, digital modes, emergency preparedness, and the inspiring mission of bringing ham radio into schools and communities across the globe.

SPOTLIGHT — RCA Youth Forum

Each year, seven to eleven young operators — some as young as nine or ten — take the Hamvention stage to share their experiments, achievements, and passion for the hobby. The forum is consistently one of the most well-attended and warmly received events of the entire weekend.

The audience was captivated. Here were young people who had built their own antennas, chased DX across continents, bounced signals off the moon, and worked satellites passing hundreds of miles overhead — presenting their accomplishments not as hobbies, but as serious scientific and technical endeavors. The room was packed, and the applause was genuine.

The forum reached a remarkable crescendo when an astronaut took the stage to address the young presenters directly — urging them to dream bigger, reach farther, and recognize that the skills they were developing in amateur radio were the same skills that take human beings beyond the atmosphere. It was a moment that drew the connection between radio waves and space exploration into vivid, personal focus: a person who had orbited the Earth, looking out at a room of young operators who might one day follow a similar path.

The next generation of operators is already here — already curious, already building, already calling CQ.

For many in the audience, it was the single most memorable moment of Hamvention 2026. For the young presenters themselves, it may well have been the moment that set the trajectory of a lifetime.

The invisible world we inhabit

There is a particular joy in belonging to a community that understands what most people walk past without a second thought: that the air around us is alive with signals. Radio waves propagate through walls, across oceans, off the ionosphere, and out beyond the atmosphere entirely. Amateur radio operators don’t just use this invisible world — they know it, in a way that is almost devotional.

Every mode of amateur communication was on display at this year’s event. CW operators tapped out Morse code. Digital enthusiasts demonstrated FT8 contacts spanning continents on a fraction of a watt. Satellite operators tracked overhead passes. EME enthusiasts — moonbouncers — described reflecting signals off the lunar surface and catching the echo nearly three seconds later. The hobby, in its full breadth, is staggering.

From Xenia to interstellar space

No reflection on amateur radio and the wonder of electromagnetic communication would be complete without a thought toward the Voyager spacecraft. Launched in 1977 — the same era that shaped a generation of today’s operators — Voyager 1 is now more than 15.8 billion miles from Earth, deep in interstellar space, beyond the heliosphere, beyond the solar system itself. And yet we are still talking to it.

A radio signal sent from Earth today takes nearly 23.5 hours to reach Voyager 1. By November 15th of this year, the probe will cross a historic threshold: it will be a full light-day away — the first human-made object ever to reach that distance. A signal sent in the morning will arrive the following morning. A reply will not return until the day after that.

This is radio at its most humbling. The same fundamental principle — an oscillating electromagnetic field propagating through space — that lets a ham in Xenia, Ohio contact a counterpart in Tokyo is the very thing keeping humanity tethered to its most distant ambassador. The physics does not change. Only the distance grows.

• Distance to Voyager 1: 15.8 billion miles
• Signal travel time: 23.5 hours one-way
• In continuous operation: 49 years

600 volunteers, one community

None of this happens without the people who make it happen. More than 600 volunteers gave their time, their expertise, and their energy to produce Hamvention 2026 — directing traffic, staffing forums, manning information booths, setting up equipment, and doing the thousand invisible tasks that keep an event of this scale moving smoothly. They did it harmoniously, enthusiastically, and without any apparent desire for credit. That, too, is very much in the spirit of amateur radio.

The event also made a meaningful impact on the surrounding community. Hamvention generates an estimated $35 million in regional economic activity each year, filling hotels and restaurants and creating a visible surge of energy throughout Greene County. For the Miami Valley, this is not just a radio convention. It is an annual affirmation that Xenia, Ohio is, for one weekend in May, the center of a global conversation.

Until next year

The fairgrounds are quiet now. The vendors have packed their tables, the forums have ended, and operators from dozens of countries are making their way home — by plane, by car, by train — many of them already looking forward to May 2027, when Hamvention will return for its 75th year.

In the meantime, the radios will keep humming. Signals will keep traveling. Somewhere in the darkness between the stars, Voyager 1 will keep moving outward at 38,000 miles per hour, faithfully answering every call we send its way.

And somewhere in that audience at the RCA Youth Forum, a ten-year-old who just heard an astronaut tell them to reach for the stars is already thinking about what comes next.

We are a remarkable species. We built something that crossed into interstellar space, and we still talk to it every day. We gather by the tens of thousands to celebrate the art of sending a signal into the unknown. We do it peacefully. We do it joyfully. We do it together.

73, and we’ll see you in Xenia next May.

Encrypting Encrypted Traffic To Get Around VPN Bans

VPNs, Virtual Private Networks, aren’t just a good idea to keep your data secure: for millions of people living under restrictive regimes they’re the only way to ensure full access to the internet. What do you do when your government orders ISPs to ban VPNs, like Russia has done recently?  [LaserHelix] shows us one way Gopniks cope, which is to use a ShadowSocks proxy.

If you’re not deep into network traffic, you might be wondering: how can an ISP block VPN traffic? Isn’t that stuff encrypted? Yes, but while the traffic going over the VPN is encrypted, you still need to connect to your VPN’s servers– and those handshake packets are easy enough to detect. You can do it at home with Wireshark, a tool that shows up fairly often on these pages. Of course if they can ID those packets, they can block them.

So, you just need a way to obfuscate what exactly the encrypted traffic you’re sending is. Luckily that’s a solved problem: Chinese hackers came up with something called Shadowsocks back in 2012 to help get around the Great Firewall, and have been in an arms-race with their authorities ever since.

Shadowsocks is not, in fact, a sibling of Gandalf’s horse as the name might suggest, but a tool to obfuscate the traffic going to your VPN. To invert a meme, you’re telling the authorities: we heard you don’t like encrypted traffic, so we put encryption in your encrypted traffic so you have to decrypt the packets before you recognize the encrypted packets.

What about the VPN? Well, some run their own shadowsocks service, while others will need to be accessed via a shadowsocks bridge: in effect, a proxy that then connects to the VPN for you. That means of course you’re bouncing through two servers you need to trust not to glow in the dark, but if you have to trust someone– otherwise it’s off to a shack in the woods, which never ends well.

Don’t forget that while VPNs can get you around government censorship, they do not provide anonymity on their own. If, like tipster [Keith Olson] –thanks for the tip, [Keith]!– you’re looking side-eyed at your government’s “think of the children!” rhetoric but don’t know where to start, we had a discussion about which VPNs to use last year.

Icom Teases X-026 Radio to be Revealed at Hamvention 2026

In a reel posted to Facebook, Icom has teased a new radio, the X-026 to be revealed at Hamvention 2026. Dubbed as a "concept mock-up," the radio appears to be a mobile rig based on the focus of a vehicle through most of the video. The radio also appears to have a detachable faceplate and support multiple antenna inputs.

From hamlife.jp:

It is a separate machine that separates the main body from the main body and the operation part (display) from the image, and the operation part has four dials around the display (upper, lower and right), and the lower left part is a large size. From its shape, it seems to be a different model from the 144 / 430MHz band D-STAR / FM mobile machine "ID-5200" exhibited at last year's "Ham Fair 2025".

THURSDAY EDITION: Welcome to New England, 90 yesterday and 62 this morning at 8am......

BBC Long Wave Shutdown Special Event

The following is a message from Nick (G4FAL):

The RSGB and the BBC Amateur Radio Group will be activating four special calls to mark the closure of BBC Long Wave transmissions on 198kHz (1500m) after more than 90 years. The Long Wave transmitters at Droitwich in Worcestershire, Westerglen near Stirling and Burghead overlooking the Moray Firth, will be closed down on 27 June 2026.

GB1500M will be active for one week from 21-27 June 2026 and may be activated from G, GM, GW, GI, GJ, GD and GU, by RSGB and BBCARG members over the period. GB198LW will be activated by Cray Valley RS (England), GB198END by Moray Firth ARS (Scotland) and GB198KHZ by Stirling and District ARS (Scotland) during the week 21-27 June 2026.

Full details are on the RSGB website https://rsgb.org – search for “BBC Long Wave Shutdown.” A commemorative QSL card will be available for any QSOs or SWL reports via M0OXO OQRS.

Source: RSGB open_in_new BBC RSGB Special Event

How do erasers actually work? It’s surprisingly complicated.

Long before humans smacked “delete” to obliterate typos, we fixed mistakes and revised written language the old-fashioned way: by rubbing errors clean off the page.

The quintessential pink eraser is now a mainstay in household junk drawers, classrooms, and office supply cabinets, but how exactly do these ingenious little pieces of technology work? How do erasers erase?

The history of erasers

Humans have marked stuff with graphite for thousands of years. However, modern pencils—which encase graphite, or a mixture of graphite and clay, in wood—date back to the 17th century. 

Contemporary erasers, meanwhile, came fashionably late. Their precursors include balled-up stale bread and wax. Then, in the 18th century, natural rubber was used as an eraser. Later, in the 19th century, raw rubber erasers were toughened up with heat and sulphur. And, finally plastic erasers debuted in the 20th century. Whether erasers were snackable, heat-treated, or even electrified, the fundamentals of erasing remain. Pencils and erasers work together through the forces of attraction—and friction.

“When you run a pencil over paper, tiny little pieces of carbon flake off and stay on the paper, and that’s what leaves the pencil mark,” Dr. Joseph A. Schwarcz, a chemistry professor who directs the Office for Science and Society at McGill University, tells Popular Science. The pencil’s “lead”—a misnomer, as it’s not actually lead—isn’t just lodged between the fibers in paper; as graphite particles shear off, they also sit atop the page and remain there due to “a very small attraction between molecules,” Schwarcz explains. 

That’s where the eraser comes in, Schwarcz says. “There’s a greater adhesion of those little [graphite] particles to rubber than to the paper, so when you rub the rubber over the paper, it removes them.”

Several thousand years before colonizers commercialized rubber, Mesoamericans developed tools and recreational items with natural latex by tapping and processing the fluid in native rubber trees. While synthetic erasers, composed of substances such as polyvinyl chloride, are now more popular than natural rubber in some parts of the world, all erasers generally work the same way: “The graphite particles are attracted more to the eraser than they are to the paper,” says Schwarcz. 

“There’s also a slight abrasion effect, where you’re dislodging the graphite particles by friction,” Schwarcz adds. This process erodes some of the paper, which helps explain why so many different varieties of erasers exist; softer erasers tend to be gentler on the page, while firmer erasers are generally more durable and precise. 

The science behind the attraction

The chemical attractions Schwarcz describes are called van der Waals forces. “Molecules have tiny little charges distributed over the atoms, and the positive charges will attract the negative charges. So paper will have some molecules with negative charges that are attracted to the positive surfaces of the graphite,” Schwarcz says. Basically, when you write with a pencil, the graphite stays on the page thanks to forces of attraction.

But the attraction between graphite and paper is pretty weak. So when you rub an eraser on a piece of paper, friction basically disrupts the attraction between the graphite and the page, and the graphite that was once on the paper ends up sticking to the eraser.

On a molecular level, graphite is made up of many two-dimensional sheets of carbon, known as graphene, stacked one upon another and held together by van der Waals forces. 

“There’s this cloud of electrons on one layer of graphene, and another cloud of electrons on another layer of graphene,” Dr. Justin Caram, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells Popular Science. The electrons on these sheets can “randomly fluctuate” to make one side a little positively charged, and the other a little negatively charged. 

“Because positive and negative charges interact with each other, that binds things together,” Caram says. In other words, we have van der Waals forces to thank for why graphite sticks together on a page.

Although individual sheets of graphene are “completely neutral and have no intrinsic dipole”—or inherently positive and negative side—“they still interact with each other because of these random fluctuations.” Caram adds, “That’s what a van der Waals force is. It’s basically a force between any two things where the electrons can move around and compensate for one another,” keeping things together—if somewhat weakly.

WEDNESDAY EDITION: Another beautiful day to get outside and do some yard and antenna work, get together at the club, and Elks for lunch...

DIY Nuclear Battery with PV Cells and Tritium

Nuclear batteries are pretty simple devices that are conceptually rather similar to photovoltaic (PV) solar, just using the radiation from a radioisotope rather than solar radiation. It’s also possible to make your own nuclear battery, with [Double M Innovations] putting together a version that uses standard PV cells combined with small tritium vials as radiation source.

The PV cells are the amorphous type, rated for 2.4 V, which means that they’re not too fussy about the exact wavelength at the cost of some general efficiency. You generally find these on solar-powered calculators for this reason. Meanwhile the tritium vials have an inner coating of phosphor so they glow. With a couple of these vials sandwiched in between two amorphous cells you thus have technically something that you could call a ‘nuclear battery’.

With an approximately 12 year half-life, tritium isn’t amazingly radioactive and thus the glow from the phosphor is also not really visible in daylight. With this DIY battery wrapped up in aluminium foil to cover it up fully, it does appear to generate some current in the nanoamp range, with a single-cell and series voltage of about 0.5 V.

A 170 VAC-rated capacitor is connected to collect some current over time, with just under 3 V measured after a night of charging. In how far the power comes from the phosphor and how much from sources like thermal radiation is hard to say in this setup. However, if you can match up the PV cell’s bandgap a bit more with the radiation source, you should be able to pull at least a few mW from a DIY nuclear battery, as seen with commercial examples.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this particular trick. A few years ago, a similar setup was used to power a handheld game, as long as you don’t mind waiting a few months for it to charge.

Blog – Hackaday Read More

DIY Weather Stations Report In From Chernobyl

You’re probably not going to hang out around Chernobyl any time soon. Still, knowing the conditions there can both satisfy your curiosity and provide scientific value. To that end, [Yury Ilyin] has spent the last couple decades installing homebrew weather stations across the Exclusion Zone for his own interest. 

The remote weather stations that [Yury] builds all follow a similar design. Each runs on three 18650 lithium cells, charged via a small solar panel. Most of these cells were salvaged from old laptop battery packs. These cells are used to power a GPRS or WiFi communications module, along with a temperature, humidity, and pressure sensor, and a Geiger counter, because, well… it’s Chernobyl.

He has been lucky enough to keep costs down by finding an old generation GPRS SIM card that could be cloned and used across multiple devices, and thus far has had no trouble receiving signals from his many distributed stations. He’s been able to use his sensor network to track the gradual decline of radioactive emissions in the area from Cs-137, as well as keep an eye on the local weather conditions in an area few ever tread.

[Yury] has built over two dozen of these devices, and several have passed the test of time—with the lithium cells and cellular hardware surviving both high and freezing temperatures as well as the ravages of rain and time. He’s continued to refine the design over the years, starting out with an ATmega644 running the show, and later upgrading to STM32 microcontrollers.

We’ve explored distributed radiation sensor networks before, too, as well as many a remote weather station.

TUESDAY EDITION: 80 at 8am, it is a good day to play in the yard and soak up some vitamin D..

2026 Hamvention Wrap-Up -- Weather or Not…

The ARRL Solar Update

New Display for Old Multimeter

As a company, Fluke has been making electronic test equipment longer than the bipolar junction transistor has been around for. In that time they’ve developed a fairly stellar reputation for quality and consistency, but like any company they don’t support their products indefinitely. [ogdento] owns a Fluke meter that isn’t nearly as old as the BJT but still has an age well outside of the support window, and since the main problem was the broken LCD display they set about building a replacement for this retro multimeter.

Initially, [ogdento] had plans to retrofit this classic multimeter with a modern OLED, but could not find enough space for the display or a way to drive it easily. The next attempt to get something working was to build a custom one-off LCD using a drill press as an end mill, which didn’t work either. But after seeing a Charlieplexed display from [bobricius] as well as this video from EEVblog about designing custom LCDs, [ogdento] was able to not only design a custom PCB and LCD display to match the original meter, but was able to get a manufacturer in China to build them.

The new displays have a few improvements over the old; mostly they are more stylistically inspired by later Fluke models and have a few modern improvements to the LCD itself. There were are few issues during prototyping but nothing that was too hard to sort out, such as ordering the wrong size elastomeric strips initially. For anyone who needs to replace a custom LCD and can’t find replacement parts anymore, this project would be a great starting point for figuring out the process from the ground up.