If you buy or sell radio gear on eBay, there's a policy change worth understanding clearly, because the headline could easily be misread as bad news for the amateur radio community. It isn't.

eBay has introduced new restrictions on US listings of radio transmitting equipment, in response to new FCC rules that took effect this week. However, after a direct enquiry from ARRL, The National Association for Amateur Radio®, eBay confirmed that its new policy will not apply to equipment that operates exclusively on amateur radio frequencies.

A veteran helicopter pilot died after his helicopter struck a 150-foot tower standing behind a ham radio operator's home in Myakka City, Florida. The 63-year-old pilot was the only person aboard, and had just finished a mosquito-control spraying run when the accident occurred shortly before 9 p.m. on 15th October, in Manatee County.

A spokesperson for the county sheriff's office told local media that firefighters pulled the pilot from the wreckage as it burned. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The guyed tower — the tallest of three standing on the property — collapsed in the crash.

If you've tried to renew your FCC amateur radio license lately and hit a wall paying the fee, you're far from alone — and one ham has put actual numbers behind just how common that problem is.

Rob Rosenberger, K4HST, has a name for the issue: the "payment labyrinth." He believes it's responsible for roughly 1 in 18 hams failing to complete payment of the $35 license-renewal fee. Rosenberger, a retired systems analyst, reached his conclusions by analysing the FCC's downloadable, publicly accessible two-year archive dating back to 2024.

Nothing moves wind-up radios off the shelves quite like a government telling the public to prepare for the worst — and that's exactly what's just happened across the UK.

Wind-up radios are selling out nationwide, with retailers reporting a fivefold surge in orders after the Government advised households to stockpile emergency supplies. At least seven models were sold out across four outlets by Saturday, just two days after ministers urged the public to buy wind-up radios and stock up on food and water as part of a broader national resilience push.

Few things in amateur radio are as taken for granted as a reliable time signal — but the system behind that precision is about to change, and it's been a long time coming.

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures has declared that the leap second is running out of time — literally. It could be phased out as early as 2027. For decades, this small periodic adjustment has kept clocks synchronised with the Earth's slightly irregular rotation, occurring roughly every couple of years. Highly precise atomic clocks have relied on it, and its presence underpins UTC, the time standard used throughout amateur radio, science, satellite operations, financial systems, and countless other fields worldwide.

If you've got an ARRL survey sitting in your inbox or mailbox right now, it's genuine — and your response actually matters more than you might think.

ARRL has commissioned an independent research firm, Readex Research, headquartered in Stillwater, Minnesota, to conduct a survey of amateur radio operators. Readex has worked with ARRL before on similar projects, including past QST readership studies and large-scale national surveys, so this isn't a new relationship.

Citizen science and amateur radio have been quietly reinforcing each other for years, and NASA has just put real money behind that relationship at a national scale.

HamSCI — the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation — will lead a significant NASA-funded effort to expand public engagement in space science. Funded through NASA's Science Activation (SciAct) program as a cooperative agreement, the citizen-science group has been entrusted with a grant totalling nearly $5.5 million to lead a space education initiative centred on space weather and amateur radio, with the University of Scranton serving as the lead academic institution. The project's goal is to bring scientific discovery out of research labs and into schools, libraries, museums, and communities across the country.

Satellite operating is one of the more technically demanding corners of the hobby, and the software behind it is just as important as the radio and antenna doing the actual work. A new platform has just arrived aiming to take some of the friction out of that side of things.

Avinstar, LLC has announced the general availability of OsTrax, a satellite tracking and operating platform now available for Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu.

Studying for a foreign amateur radio licence is never easy when the material isn't in your first language — or in one you're confident reading technical English in. A new free resource is aiming to close exactly that gap for China's licensing exams.

A bilingual practice question bank for the Chinese Radio Amateurs Club (CRAC) amateur radio operator certificate is now available free online at bg7bag.com.

Pirate radio enforcement continues to be an uphill battle for the FCC, but this round of cases shows the Commission isn't inclined to go easy on offenders who come forward — even when they cooperate.

The Federal Communications Commission has affirmed penalties of $20,000 in three separate pirate radio cases, including one where the operator admitted responsibility, said he'd disposed of the equipment, and specifically asked for leniency. The request was denied.

Rideshare launches have become one of the easiest ways for the amateur satellite community to get hardware into orbit, and Transporter-18 just delivered one of the strongest showings yet.

Six satellites from three AMSAT organisations reached orbit following the launch of SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on 1st October. The international lineup included three ERMINAZ-2 PocketQubes from AMSAT-DL in Germany, HADES-L and UNNE-1B from AMSAT-EA in Spain, and SanoSat-2 from AMSAT Nepal. The spacecraft rode aboard OSSIE-D, the first orbital transfer vehicle developed by Spanish space transportation company UARX Space, which began deploying its payload of small satellites after separating from the Falcon 9 upper stage.

Some milestones only last minutes, but the impact sticks around a lot longer. This is one of those stories.

Chile has just marked its first-ever direct amateur radio contact between a public school and the International Space Station — a moment that lasted exactly 10 minutes, but one the students involved are unlikely to forget any time soon.