Issue 440 September 26, 2026

Top links

Will RADE be the next SSB?
RADE occupies half the bandwidth of a SSB signal and reportedly provides more natural-sounding speech.
ARRL

MacWinlink--A native macOS client for Winlink
The goal of MacWinlink is to provide feature parity with Winlink Express.
Winlink

Vanity call applications: Do your homework
37% of applications contained one or more errors.
QueryBang

Join the RADE V2 testing team
This will involve real-time, over-the-air, push-to-talk (PTT) testing. Testers will need to follow our test and issue submission guidelines.
FreeDV

ID-5200A first impressions
It’s an ID-52 A Plus on steroids.
Andrew Woodward

This digital radio gets messages to the world’s remotest locations
It sends encrypted signals with no satellites or relay towers required.
IEEE Spectrum

Hunter Radio Group repeaters hit by cable theft at Mt Sugarloaf
Coaxial cables were cut and removed from the Mt Sugarloaf site last weekend.
WIA

Call sign lookup & vanity prediction site
Pending FCC vanity applications of every format. Each requested call-sign is given a predicted outcome.
W5ZQ

How to power a 100W Ham Radio with portable solar panels
The system is built step-by-step, including the battery, solar panels, charge controllers, cabling, and Powerpole connections.
Off Grid Ham Radio OH8STN

A Ham Radio operator's take on the Fermi Paradox
The Fermi paradox, in one line: a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, most of them billions of years older than the Sun, should be full of civilizations, so where is everybody? After 65 years of listening for carriers near 1420 MHz — Ozma, SETI@home, Breakthrough Listen — the band is still dead. A new hypothesis, called Behavioral SETI, asks whether the silence is a design feature: instead of listening for a transmitter, it has run 49 searches of public astrophysics archives for a network that signals by modulating sources already on the air — leaving the demodulation to us.
KC2JJM

End of an Era: Kyodo News radiofax service discontinued
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I knew that sooner or later this was going to happen.
The SWLing Post

Video

POTA/SOTA activation at Diamond Head turns into real-world emergency response
An opportunity for an Amateur Radio operator to put years of emergency preparedness and communications training to practical use.
KH6ML

Project Mercury: VARA alternative for high speed HF data communications
The project is Open Source, available for multiple platforms, and free in all common definitions of that term. It emulates the same software API as the popular VARA modem product, allowing it to be used in many existing systems.
SFARC W6EK