The September 2025 Contest Corral is available for download from the ARRL Contest Calendar page.

Amateur radio had a crucial role in locating a mother and her 9-year son lost in California’s Stanislaus National Forest. On Friday July 11, 2025, the pair was reported overdue from a day trip to Camp Wolfeboro, a popular scout camp in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, according to a news release.

On Saturday July 12, the Calaveras County Volunteer Search and Rescue Team (SAR) was conducting its monthly training exercise along the Stanislaus River when members received notification that Tami and son Stirling had been reported missing since Friday afternoon and were not answering their cell phones.

In the community of radio amateurs scattered around the planet we have a habit of getting together with others to have fun in whatever shape that takes. The obvious ones are HAMfests, car boot sales, raffles and other amateur adjacent pursuits, but we also do things like licence training, weekly on-air nets, contesting, portable activations, climbing mountains, or hills, setting-up in parks, or lighthouses, we set-up on a field day, just for fun, and find excuses, sorry, reasons, for any number of other activities.

Some of these are solitary affairs, but many are best enjoyed shared with multiple friends, both old and new ones. Having been a member of this community since 2010 I’ve come to observe an aspect of this community that is odd, to say the least.

The August 2025 Contest Corral is available for download from the ARRL Contest Calendar page.

ARRL Field Day 2025 is now in the history books. The Red River Radio Amateurs once again activated their club callsign—W0ILO—as a Class 3A¹ station from the Cass County Highway Department in West Fargo, ND.

We had 22 visitors and operators on our sign-in sheet at the end of the event, including some who were visiting us for the first time to see what ham radio was all about.