One hour where amateur radio gets treated as the applied science it actually is. A Fourth of July companion to this week’s broadcast, with the physics, the gear, and the links you can verify yourself.

Right this second, a transmitter somewhere is firing one hundred watts up a feedline toward an antenna, and at the very last connector the antenna turns half of it back. Fifty watts, refused at the door, wheeling around and charging back down the cable toward the radio that just paid to send them out. Where does that power go? Why does a little box of coils and capacitors between the radio and the wire seem to make the whole problem disappear, and is it actually fixed or just hidden where your meter cannot see? That fight, watts up and watts back, is one of the oldest and most misunderstood pieces of physics in the hobby. Tonight we settle it, along with the sixty-dollar instrument that lets you see it, the pocket radio that solves it in hardware, and the century-old story that explains why any of these frequencies are ours at all.

News Radar

A dense week. If you are studying for a license, the most urgent item first: a new Technician question pool took effect July 1, 2026. Every Element 2 exam given from this month forward draws from the 2026 to 2030 pool (409 questions, with 27 new, 30 removed, and about 155 modified). Check the date on your study material, because anything built for the old pool will drill you on retired questions and miss new ones. Volunteer examiners and licensing instructors, this is the week to double-check everything you hand out.

• 13 Colonies Special Event is on the air now, July 1 to 7. Work stations K2A through K2M, one per original colony, plus bonus stations WM3PEN (Philadelphia), GB13COL (England), and TM13COL (France). Work one to participate, all sixteen for a clean sweep certificate. Shortwave listeners can play too.
• IARU HF World Championship runs next weekend, July 11 and 12, 1200 UTC Saturday through 1159 UTC Sunday. Even if you do not contest, it is one of the best band-condition surveys of the year, because for one day the whole world transmits at once.
• Field Day paperwork is due by July 28 via the web app at field-day.arrl.org. If your club operated and nobody claimed the log-submission job, that is now your assignment. Results publish in December QST.
• Regulatory and housekeeping notes: Canada is reviewing its antenna and tower policy (regulators read each other’s homework, so it is worth watching wherever you live); a global registry has begun verifying DMR IDs, so take two minutes to confirm your registration is current; and the FCC opened a 3.5 billion dollar spectrum auction, its first in four years, a good reminder of how valuable the airwaves are.
• Courtesy note: following the earthquake in Venezuela, operators in the Americas have been asked to keep 7.135 MHz clear for emergency traffic. Listen before you transmit, and give life-safety work plenty of room.

Antenna tuners and impedance matching, demystified

The whole argument comes down to a badly named box: an antenna tuner does not tune your antenna. Every radio is designed to push its power into a specific load, almost always 50 ohms. When the antenna system it sees actually looks like 50 ohms, power flows out smoothly. When it looks like something else, part of the power reflects and travels back down the feedline. That reflection is what your SWR meter reports, and here is subtlety number one: the meter tells you about the match where the meter sits, almost always at the radio end of the coax, not out at the antenna. A long, lossy feedline eats the reflected wave on the way back, so the meter can read deceptively low while the antenna is badly mismatched. A happy meter is not automatically a happy antenna.

Modern solid-state finals protect themselves by folding back, quietly reducing output power when they see a bad match. So a mismatch at the radio costs you either stress on the finals or automatic power reduction. A tuner is an adjustable impedance transformer, a network of inductors and capacitors between the radio and the feedline, that converts whatever the line presents into the 50 ohms the radio demands. When it is adjusted right, the radio sees a perfect match, stops folding back, and delivers full power into the system. That is real and worth having. But the antenna did not change, the feedline did not change, and the reflected wave still bounces between the antenna and the tuner, paying a loss toll in the coax on every round trip. That is the whole argument settled: a tuner recovers the power your transmitter was withholding, and does nothing about the power your feedline turns into heat.

Subtlety number two: high SWR on low-loss line is nearly free, high SWR on long cheap coax is expensive. The feedline choice, not the tuner, decides whether a mismatch is a smart compromise (like a ladder-line-fed doublet, where the mismatch is the plan) or an expensive apology. Match as close to the antenna as you can, which is why remote autotuners at the feedpoint are popular, and why some antennas carry their matching built in (the transformer on an end-fed wire is doing exactly this job). And if the same antenna on the same band needs heroic matching every single day, that is not an operating problem, that is the antenna asking for twenty minutes with a tape measure. One warning if you run an amplifier: mismatch tolerance shrinks as power grows. A barefoot radio shrugs at 2 to 1, but a kilowatt into the same mismatch welds relay contacts. Get the match sorted at low power first.

The NanoVNA: a laboratory on every bench

Everything above raises an obvious question: how do you actually see impedance? For most of amateur radio history, seeing the whole picture across a band required a vector network analyzer that cost as much as a car. Then an open-source design met cheap manufacturing and the NanoVNA happened, a genuine vector network analyzer the size of a deck of cards for the price of a tank of gas. “Vector” is the key word. A simple SWR meter measures magnitude only, how big the reflection is. A vector instrument measures magnitude and phase, so it does not just tell you the match is bad, it tells you why, whether the impedance is too high or too low, capacitive or inductive, which way to trim. And it generates its own tiny test signal, so you get all of this without ever keying a transmitter.

The one habit you cannot skip is calibration. The instrument has no way of knowing what your cables and connectors are doing, so you teach it: screw on the short, open, and 50-ohm load standards one at a time, and it mathematically erases everything between itself and that point. Takes about a minute, and it is the difference between the truth and confident nonsense. Once calibrated, you can sweep an antenna across a whole band and see the SWR curve as a curve (trimming becomes sweep, shorten, sweep, done), run feedline forensics to find a coax run’s length, loss, and distance to a fault, and measure whether that common-mode choke you wound actually chokes at the frequency you built it for. It turns forum recipes into verified engineering. Honest limits: a sixty-dollar box is not a metrology lab, the included cables are flimsy and worth replacing, and above a few hundred megahertz the budget models get less trustworthy. Pair it with the free NanoVNA-Saver software for big sweeps and saved sessions, and mind the delicate front end: do not sweep an antenna while someone nearby transmits, and let a big antenna bleed off static before you connect.

Featured rig: the HF Signals zBitx v2

Full disclosure, there is one on this desk. The zBitx v2 is a complete, all-mode, software-defined HF transceiver, 80 through 10 meters, with a touchscreen, built-in microphone, keyer, logging, and digital modes onboard. It weighs 415 grams with its batteries and costs 269 dollars, shipped tested, not a kit. The lineage matters: the designer is Ashhar Farhan, VU2ESE, in Hyderabad, whose BITX design two decades ago was a simple sideband transceiver built from cheap parts and published openly. That grew into HF Signals, the BITX40 and uBITX kits, then the software-defined sBitx line, and now this pocket-sized member of the family. Everything is open, schematics, circuit description, and source code all on GitHub.

The engineering is genuinely clever. Inside are two computers: a 64-bit Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W does the signal processing, modes, logging, and waterfall, while a separate Raspberry Pi Pico W runs the touchscreen front panel. In v2 the two talk over Wi-Fi rather than a wired bus, a change that cured the CW keying lag of the first version. V2 also added an LDMOS final at around fifty percent efficiency (five watts costs noticeably less battery than before) and fixed a receiver spur. You get five watts on all bands, SSB, CW, AM, FT8, FreeDV, SSTV, and more via onboard Fldigi, running from two 18650 cells or any 6 to 9 volt supply at about 300 mA on receive. And the punchline from the tuner segment lands in hardware: v2 has an end-fed half-wave matching transformer built in, with a switch. Flip it, clip roughly 66 feet of wire to the connector, throw the far end over a branch, and the radio’s internal transformer does the impedance matching, converting that wire’s several-thousand-ohm feedpoint down to what the transmitter wants. The whole antenna system is a spool of wire.

Straight talk, because this is worth buying with eyes open: this is proudly an experimenter’s radio. Five watts QRP with everything that implies about patience. The touchscreen is resistive, wanting a firm fingertip or stylus. It wants a solid nine volts and fresh cells at boot. Firmware updates are a hands-on, open-a-terminal affair. The flip side is that the software improves constantly, the community is loud and generous, and there are active third-party firmware efforts. You are not buying a sealed product, you are buying a seat in an open workshop. Two demos that make it click: FT8 with no laptop (the decoder runs on the radio itself, so you work digital DX from a picnic table with nothing plugged in but a wire and batteries), and remote operation out of the box (there is a networked Linux computer inside, so you can park it at the antenna feedpoint and drive it from the comfortable chair in another room).

Hear yourself around the world: RBN and PSK Reporter

Radio’s oldest question is “is anybody actually hearing me?” For a century the only answer was another human telling you. Now you can key up once and, within thirty seconds, watch a map of the planet light up with who heard you, where, and how loud. The Reverse Beacon Network (reversebeacon.net) is a network of volunteer stations running skimmer software, tireless robot ears descended from CW Skimmer, that decode every Morse signal on a band at once and post every callsign they hear within seconds. Call CQ one time and you get a report card: this station in Sweden heard you at this signal strength, this one in Arizona, this one in Japan, with your frequency and sending speed, and you never made a single contact. PSK Reporter (pskreporter.info) does the same for the digital modes, except the receivers are everybody: nearly every copy of the popular digital software quietly reports what it decodes, so the map is drawn by thousands of ordinary stations. Make an FT8 contact and you are already on it.

These tools are for settling arguments with measurements. Two antennas and an opinion about which is better? Call CQ on the first, note the signal-to-noise numbers from a few skimmers, switch antennas, call again on the same frequency, and compare, real numbers from the far end of the path, for free. Same trick before and after you trim a wire or replace suspect coax. And before you transmit at all, the maps double as a live propagation report: look at who is hearing whom on a band right now and you know if it is open. The poetry of it is that this whole system is just reception reports, the same thing amateurs have traded since the beginning, automated and drawn on a map. Homework you do not even need a license for the first half of: open PSK Reporter, pick the 20-meter band, and watch the planet talk to itself.

Independence week: how amateurs inherited the world

In the early 1920s, radio meant long waves. The longer the wavelength, the better the range, that was the settled science, and governments and commercial giants built alternator stations the size of factories to hurl longwave signals across oceans (one of them, the Alexanderson alternator at Grimeton in Sweden, still runs on ceremonial occasions). When the licensing dust settled after the first world war, amateurs were handed what everyone agreed was the junk drawer of the spectrum: everything below 200 meters, the shortwaves, wavelengths the experts considered useless. Keep the attic, kids.

Except nobody had checked whether the attic was useless. Through 1921 and 1922 amateurs on both sides of the Atlantic organized listening tests, and in November 1923 came the breakthrough: a scheduled two-way contact across the Atlantic on roughly 110 meters, between Leon Deloy (8AB in Nice, France) and Fred Schnell and John Reinartz operating in Connecticut, on a fraction of the power the longwave giants burned. It was not a fluke; within months dozens of stations were doing it, and within a couple of years amateurs had worked around the planet. What they had stumbled into was ionospheric skip, the same physics this show never stops talking about. The junk drawer contained the keys to worldwide communication at low power, and the moment that became undeniable, everybody wanted the shortwaves. The amateurs kept slices of it on the strength of having discovered the value first, and those slices are the HF bands you operated this week. A straight line runs from that 1923 contact to this week’s 3.5 billion dollar spectrum auction. The amateurs earned their seat at the table not by lobbying first, but by discovering first: thousands of curious people on frequencies nobody else wanted, writing down what they heard. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what a reception report is.

Next week and links

Next week: off-grid power for the shack and the field, the batteries that changed the rules, solar that actually works, and how to keep a station on the air when the nearest outlet is a rumor. Until then, nothing here is something you have to take on faith. Here is where to dig:

Study and on-air events

• NCVEC 2026 to 2030 Technician question pool, the official source (effective July 1, 2026).
• The 13 Colonies Special Event, July 1 to 7.
• IARU HF World Championship, July 11 and 12.
• ARRL Field Day, entries due July 28.

Test gear and the featured rig

• NanoVNA-Saver, the free companion software for the NanoVNA.
• HF Signals zBitx v2, the featured rig, plus its open source code and schematics.

Hear yourself around the world

• Reverse Beacon Network, real-time CW and digital spotting.
• PSK Reporter, the digital-mode reception map.
• WSJT-X, the FT8 software that feeds PSK Reporter.

Enjoy the fireworks, be good to each other. Clear, clean, curious. This is Echos in the Ether.

One hour where amateur radio gets treated as the applied science it actually is. A companion to this week’s broadcast, timed to Field Day weekend, with the dates, frequencies, and links you can verify yourself.

Sixty miles over your head, a patch of the upper atmosphere just turned into a mirror. It is invisible, it is the size of a county, and it will be gone within the hour. But for as long as it hangs there, a five watt radio and a length of wire in a tree can bounce a signal off it and land in another hemisphere. We nicknamed the band where this happens the Magic Band, but there is no magic in it. There is ionized gas, an angle of incidence, and an operator who was ready. The timing this week is almost unfair, because three different things are peaking at once: Field Day is happening around us, six meters is hurling signals across oceans daily, and the best performing antenna at most Field Day sites is a piece of wire cut to the right length and hung in the right air.

News Radar: Field Day is live right now

ARRL Field Day 2026 runs 1800 UTC Saturday June 27 through 2059 UTC Sunday June 28. If you are hearing this when it airs, somebody within radio range of you is operating off a battery under a pop-up tent. For scale, the 2025 running drew entries from more than 4,300 clubs, groups, and individuals, with participation by nearly 32,000 operators and more than 1.2 million contacts reported in a single 24 hour window. This year’s theme is “Amateur Radio, A National Resource,” and ARRL is taking part as a supporting partner in the America 250 commemoration. It is not too late to participate even casually: find a club site with the ARRL Field Day locator, show up, and operate a few contacts at a Get On The Air station. Field Day is the one weekend a year where strangers will happily hand you a microphone and explain everything.

A few more headlines worth your attention. Governors keep noticing us: Ohio Governor Mike DeWine proclaimed June 27 and 28 as Amateur Radio Operators’ Appreciation Days, following recent Washington State recognition. The takeaway is not applause, it is documentation: have your club screenshot and archive those proclamations for the next antenna-accommodation conversation. There is also a standing courtesy reminder circulating to keep 7.135 MHz clear for emergency traffic when nets activate. Know your region’s emergency calling and net frequencies, and give them room.

The Magic Band: six meters and sporadic-E

Six meters lives at 50 MHz, right at the doorstep between high frequency and the VHF world, and it behaves like neither parent. Most of the year it is a polite local band. Then summer arrives and for hours at a time it turns into a worldwide teleporter. The engine is sporadic-E: patches of intense ionization that form in the E region, roughly 60 to 70 miles up, act like mirrors that suddenly appear, reflect six meter signals back to earth hundreds or thousands of miles away, then dissolve. You do not get a schedule. You get a season, roughly late May into July in the northern hemisphere. Preparation beats prediction. The band does not care about your forecast app. It cares whether your station was ready when the mirror appeared.

The band has been throwing a party. Through late May and June, operators logged rare DX: Chad and Senegal worked from Virginia, a historic opening to Europe from the Pacific Northwest, 85 Japanese stations in a single Arkansas evening, and transatlantic paths reopening as recently as June 22 and 25. Here is your dial map. The center of modern six meter activity is 50.313 MHz, the FT8 calling frequency, and that is your best opening detector: if 50.313 is busy with distant grids, the band is open. For intercontinental work, operators use a DX window at 50.323 MHz with sequence etiquette so a strong local does not stomp the rare DX. The SSB calling frequency is 50.125 MHz, the CW operators live near 50.0 and up, and beacons in the lower segment are a free, honest announcement that the door just opened.

You do not need a giant array. When sporadic-E is cooking, signals can be enormous and a simple antenna works real DX. The honest hierarchy: a half-wave dipole cut for six meters, up as high as you can manage, gets you on the air; a halo or loop gives small horizontal omnidirectional coverage; a small two or three element yagi adds gain and is physically tiny and cheap on six meters; and many modern HF radios already cover six meters, so try what you own first. Sporadic-E generally favors horizontal polarization for the long haul, but during a strong opening even a low antenna gets out, so do not let perfect be the enemy of on the air.

Wire antennas, ranked honestly, no mysticism

Wire is not a compromise. Wire is how an enormous fraction of serious DX gets worked every single day. A resonant wire in clear air, fed correctly, will embarrass a fancy vertical squatting in a noisy yard. The cheapest antenna in the catalog is also frequently the best one. Here is the honest hierarchy from simplest to most flexible:

• The half-wave dipole. Two equal legs of wire, fed in the center with coax, cut to roughly 468 divided by the frequency in MHz for total length in feet. Resonant, efficient, forgiving, and the backbone of amateur radio for a century. If you build one antenna in your life, build a dipole for your favorite band.
• The inverted V. The same dipole, supported high at the center on a single mast or branch with the ends drooping down. Now you need only one tall support instead of two, which is the difference between a backyard you can use and a fantasy.
• The end-fed half-wave (EFHW). A half-wave wire fed at one end through a 49 to 1 matching transformer. The feed point is at your feet, deployment is fast, and many designs are multiband on the harmonics. The darling of park and trail operators.
• The random wire with a 9 to 1 unun and a tuner. Maximum flexibility, minimum resonance. A deliberately odd length wire plus a counterpoise lets a tuner find a match across many bands. The antenna of apartment dwellers and attic operators. Honesty matters: a tuner makes your radio happy, it does not turn a bad antenna into a good one. Sometimes operating beats optimizing.
• The linked dipole and the fan dipole. Two ways to be multiband without a tuner. The linked dipole clips to the right length per band; the fan dipole hangs several dipoles from one feed point and self-selects which resonates.

Two feedline truths that save beginners real money. First, coax has loss, and loss climbs with frequency and length, so for long runs or six meters spend on lower-loss line. Second, connectors are where good installations quietly die: weatherproof outdoor connections and learn to install connectors cleanly. And do not skip the common-mode choke at the feed point, it is the cheapest insurance in your toolbox. One last clarity check: keep three ideas separate. Safety grounding protects you from shock, lightning protection routes a strike to earth, and the RF counterpoise or radial system is about making the antenna work. A single rod in the dirt cannot do all three.

The trail: Parks on the Air and Summits on the Air

Portable operating has quietly become one of the biggest stories in the hobby. Parks on the Air (POTA) now reports more than 85,000 registered parks, more than 84,000 registered operators, and approaching 53 million logged contacts, processing more than a million contacts every month. That is Field Day volume, every month, all year. POTA is about operating from or contacting designated parks and public lands; Summits on the Air (SOTA) is about qualified mountain summits with a points system tied to height and difficulty. POTA you can do from a picnic table. SOTA usually involves a hike and a pack.

There are two roles and you can play either tonight with zero special gear. A hunter (or chaser) works the portable stations from home: watch the spotting page, see who is activating, tune them up, and log the contact. An activator is the one out in the park or on the summit calling CQ. The spotting magic is the secret sauce: activators post their callsign, frequency, and park or summit reference to a live website, hunters watch and pounce, and a tiny station running low power can draw a pileup in minutes. Two phrases to chase: park to park and summit to summit, when an activator works another activator, both portable at the same time.

A POTA or SOTA kit is almost comically minimal: a low-power radio (often QRP at five watts or less), a small lithium iron phosphate battery, a wire antenna (this is exactly where the EFHW or linked dipole shines), a logging app or paper, and something to sit on. Portable strips away your crutches: at five watts in a field, every decibel of antenna efficiency and every bit of operating skill matters. It is a skills gym disguised as a nature walk. And remember you carry the hobby’s reputation onto public land every time, so follow the park’s rules, do not damage trees, pack out everything, and be happy to explain what you are doing to curious hikers.

Ten honest minutes on the Hermes Lite 2

Let us spend ten honest minutes on a single radio, because it is one of the most interesting machines in the hobby and most operators have never touched one. The Hermes Lite 2. Picture a high-frequency transceiver, fully software-defined, open-source hardware and software, that costs a few hundred dollars, fits in your hand, has almost no knobs, and plugs into your network instead of your computer’s USB port. It is not a receiver-only dongle. It transmits, it is real, and there is a genuine community around it for good reasons.

It grew out of the open high-performance software-defined radio project (OpenHPSDR), when developer Steve Haynal (KF7O) and a community asked whether that serious, expensive architecture could be built in a low-cost lite version ordinary experimenters could afford. “Lite” means cheaper and simpler, not fake. At the heart is a broadband modem chip, the AD9866, originally designed for cable modems, containing a 12 bit analog-to-digital converter and a matching digital-to-analog converter running tens of millions of samples per second. The antenna runs through some filtering and feeds almost directly into that converter. There is no traditional stack of mixers and crystal filters and intermediate frequencies: the signal becomes numbers almost immediately, and from that point on the entire radio is math.

Those numbers are handled by a field-programmable gate array, an FPGA (an Intel Cyclone 4 on the Hermes Lite 2), whose logic you can rewrite. Because it is an FPGA and the design is open, the radio’s behavior can be updated and improved over the network, the same radio getting smarter without new hardware. And it is a networked radio: it connects with wired Ethernet and speaks the HPSDR protocol over your local network, so the radio can sit by the best antenna feed and the least noise while your control computer lives anywhere else in the house. Stretch that idea and you have the bones of a remote station. Because the whole receiver is math, one Hermes Lite 2 can produce several independent receivers at once, scattered across bands, all from the same little box.

Now the honest engineering. It transmits about five watts. That is QRP, plenty for digital modes and chasing six meter openings, but for ragchewing on a noisy band you will want an external amplifier. The 12 bit converter is excellent for the money but is not the 16 bit front end of a flagship rig, so in brutal crowded-band conditions a top-tier radio still out-muscles it on pure dynamic range. And a software-defined transmitter needs proper output filtering or it throws energy where it should not; the ecosystem includes filter boards (the best known designed by James Ahlstrom, N2ADR) for exactly this. The radio is only half the system. Filters, the amplifier, and your antenna are the rest.

On the software side you get to choose, and there are several strong options. Thetis is a full-featured Windows console descended from the PowerSDR lineage, the comfortable home for the classic big-radio experience. Quisk is an open-source, lightweight, hackable SDR written largely in Python by that same N2ADR, fitting the Hermes Lite 2 hand in glove. SparkSDR is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, Mac, even the Raspberry Pi) and leans hard into multiple receivers, decoding FT8 on several bands at once. For the Pi and Linux crowd, piHPSDR and linHPSDR from John Melton (G0ORX) let you build a standalone touchscreen console with knobs and a display again. And for true experimenters, the radio speaks open protocols, so it drops into GNU Radio where you build your own signal processing flow. For the digital modes most people want (FT8, FT4, JS8) you pair your chosen console with the usual decoders like WSJT-X. Five watts, twelve bits, one Ethernet cable, and an enormous amount of fun. That is the Hermes Lite 2.

Also on the calendar

• The 13 Colonies Special Event runs July 1 to 7, with stations representing the original colonies plus a British forces station and a bonus station. Beginner-friendly, and the perfect next target if Field Day lights a spark.
• HAM RADIO in Friedrichshafen, Europe’s largest amateur radio gathering, runs June 26 to 28, sharing the hall with a full astronomy fair for the first time.
• AMSAT runs its own Field Day on the satellites this same weekend, with more than ten transponders and repeaters in play and a bonus for working a contact through space.
• In Sweden, the century-old Alexanderson alternator at Grimeton, station SAQ, one of the last working mechanical radio transmitters on Earth, has been firing up its enormous very-low-frequency signal for special transmissions.

Your seven-day challenge

Honest and small. Program 50.313 into a memory and monitor six meters in the evening, then log one contact or even one distant grid you copied. Build and raise one wire antenna on one realistic support, inverted V style, with a choke at the feed point. Hunt or activate one park. Three actions, one week, no spending spree required. Share the method with your club, because teaching the on-ramp multiplies the hobby. Next week: antenna tuners and impedance matching demystified, what a tuner actually does, what it cannot do, and why the meter on your radio is not the whole story.

Links and further reading

Everything in this hour is something you can verify yourself. Here is where to start digging.

Field Day and on-air events

• ARRL Field Day, the official home page (rules, packet, and the Year of the Club materials).
• ARRL Field Day Station Locator, find a public Field Day site near you.
• The 13 Colonies Special Event, July 1 to 7, a beginner-friendly clean-sweep chase.
• HAM RADIO Friedrichshafen, Europe’s largest amateur radio exhibition, June 26 to 28, sharing the hall with the new Astro fair.

Six meters and the satellites

• AMSAT, the amateur satellite organization (and host of AMSAT Field Day on the birds).
• SAQ Grimeton, the century-old Alexanderson alternator, one of the last working mechanical transmitters on Earth.

Portable operating

• Parks on the Air (POTA), park references, the spotting page, and the rules.
• Summits on the Air (SOTA), summit references, the points system, and the rules.

The Hermes Lite 2 and its software

• Hermes Lite 2 project page, and the community wiki (hardware, schematics, getting started).
• Thetis, the full-featured Windows console from the OpenHPSDR lineage.
• Quisk, the open-source Python SDR by James Ahlstrom, N2ADR.
• SparkSDR, cross-platform, with strong multi-receiver and multi-band FT8 decoding.
• piHPSDR and linHPSDR, standalone consoles from John Melton, G0ORX.
• WSJT-X, the standard decoder for FT8, FT4, and the other weak-signal modes.

Clear, clean, curious. This is Echos in the Ether.

This week’s program is pure amateur radio: Field Day prep, working the satellites, and the new wave of local AI showing up on the bench. A companion to the broadcast, with the dates, frequencies, and links you can verify yourself.

Field Day is next weekend

ARRL Field Day 2026 runs June 27 and 28, 1800 UTC Saturday through 2059 UTC Sunday, the same fourth-weekend-of-June ritual the hobby has kept since 1933. This year’s theme is “Amateur Radio, A National Resource,” paired with the Year of the Club push. Treat it as antenna practice, logging practice, emergency-power practice, and the social glue that keeps clubs alive, not just a score. New to it? Use the ARRL Field Day site locator to find a club near you. Been doing it forever? Mentor someone who looks nervous near the coax, and make sure your GOTA (Get On The Air) station is ready. Entries are due by the Tuesday, July 28 deadline.

One hard-won lesson from the show: demonstrate the whole chain before the public arrives, generator, transfer switch, and logging laptop included. Politics and newcomers both watch the chain, not just the radio.

Work a bird this week

The amateur satellites are not a side quest for people with acreage and giant rotators. More than ten transponders and repeaters are alive right now. AMSAT Field Day runs concurrent with ARRL Field Day (1800 UTC June 27 to 2100 UTC June 28) and counts by mode: one QSO per FM bird such as SO-50 (and ISS voice when active), and multiple SSB and CW contacts on linear transponders like AO-7, RS-44, AO-73, FO-29, and JO-97. Working at least one satellite during Field Day earns ARRL bonus points. Two new designations to add to your tracker: SO-127 (HADES-SA / SpinnyOne, carrying SSDV and CODEC 2) and FO-126 (OrigamiSat-2).

First-bird checklist for mortals: install a pass-prediction app, start with FM before linear, plan for Doppler (high on the uplink early in the pass, low on the downlink), practice with a handheld and a whip before blaming a rotator you do not own, listen to a full pass before you transmit, then call once, clearly, and log it like any other QSO. You do not need a tower farm.

Software heads-up: AMSAT is retiring classic Two Line Element distribution because the five-digit catalog numbers are running out. General Perturbations data (JSON, XML, KVN) is in beta now, with production migration expected July 2026. Test your tracking stack before Field Day, not during it. Also note that ARISS radios power down for a spacewalk from June 29 to July 1, so plan any ISS voice attempts around that window.

The AI bench, with the license intact

Artificial intelligence is finally useful on the radio side where it stays local, auditable, and subordinate to a licensed operator who can still explain what happened on frequency. Three projects worth a look: RFWhisper, fully local, open-source ML noise reduction (DeepFilterNet 3 with an RNNoise fallback in a GNU Radio, SoapySDR, and ONNX pipeline) that helps you tell a closed band from a noisy shack without streaming your audio to anyone; SmartSDR MCP, which lets an AI assistant control a FlexRadio through a strict propose, approve, transmit loop so the human stays legally responsible for every emission; and a FreeDV Reporter edge setup that summarizes DX opportunities with a local LLM and no cloud fees. The rule of the whole segment: local ears, approved transmit, human responsibility, club education.

Also on the calendar

• ARRL Kids Day is today, June 20, 1800 to 2359 UTC. Slow down, use plain phonetics, celebrate the contact, skip the lecture unless they ask for it.
• HAM RADIO Friedrichshafen, Europe’s largest amateur radio exhibition, June 26 to 28, meeting the ASTRO astronomy fair for the first time.
• The 13 Colonies Special Event, July 1 to 7, a friendly on-ramp for newer operators chasing a clean sweep.
• Solar weather is politely boring (low activity, C-class only), so conditions are not the excuse this week. Shack discipline and operating skill win.

Your seven-day challenge

Small and honest: write one Field Day purpose sentence tonight, listen to one complete satellite pass without transmitting, and label one unknown power brick in your go-kit. If Field Day weekend beats you to it, do all three anyway between setup and tear-down, then teach the method to someone in your club. Next week: a club-culture deep dive on turning “Year of the Club” talk into real membership, real training calendars, and a real public face.

Clear, clean, curious. This is Echos in the Ether.