This month, the ARRL and the Amateur Radio community celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Amateur Radio Emergency Service®, or ARES®. To help commemorate this milestone, the ARRL has introduced an anniversary Challenge Coin. The die-struck, 1.5 inch brass coin depicts the ARES 75th anniversary logo in gold with red, white and blue color fill, while the reverse shows the ARRL diamond logo again...

Robert Macedo, KD1CY, ARES SKYWARN Coordinator and Eastern Massachusetts ARES Section Emergency Coordinator, provided this report on the afternoon of Friday, September 3:

The following is a situation report from the Eastern Massachusetts ARRL Section on Hurricane Earl. The good news is that Earl has weakened to a Category-1 hurricane. The other good news is that its track remains on target with ...

 The Air Force Military Auxiliary Radio System (MARS) organization has a new “interim” Chief. Outgoing USAF MARS Chief Allen Eiermann, K3LSR, retired at the end of May and was replaced by TSgt Jason E. Sandifer. Sandifer is a systems manager stationed at the Air Force Network Integration Center (AFNIC) at Scott AFB, Illinois. AFNIC is the headquarters of the national Air Force MARS organization...

Over this past week, four new sunspot groups appeared. Group 1101 was already in place since August 24, and 1102 emerged on August 29. On September 1, two new sunspot groups -- 1103 and 1104 -- appeared, and on September 2, sunspot group 1105 arrived. Through August 26-September 2, the daily sunspot numbers were 23, 11, 11, 25, 28, 27, 51 and 52 and these same eight days saw the relative total ...

By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor

This week, Surfin’ makes plans for emergency communications of the hurricane variety.  

As I write this, Connecticut and the Northeast are looking down the barrel of Hurricane Earl. It looks like my neck of the woods will only receive a glancing, but powerful blow, but points south and east of us will not be so lucky.

Having lived through direct hits fro...