New Years Eve: SKN or the Usual?

As you can see above, I already had tickets to my usual New Years Eve event, but the more I think about it, I might actually participate in Straight Key Night, an annual event where ham radio operators annually celebrate our Morse Code heritage by making contacts using a traditional morse code straight key.  This 24 hour event is not actually a contest, but rather a day dedicated to celebrating our CW heritage. Participants are encouraged to get on the air and simply make enjoyable, conversational CW contacts. The use of straight keys or bugs (rather than electronic keyers) to send CW is preferred. No points are scored but all who participate are winners.

Dan Henderson, N1ND of the ARRL summed it up nicely:

FCC to Delete Obsolete Part 97 Rules on February 10, 2026

This one's admittedly a sleeper for non-hams.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in October 2025 adopted a Report and Order to delete almost 400 obsolete rules pertaining to its wireless services. As previously reported by ARRL, among the deletions were four in Part 97 that govern the Amateur Radio Service.

ARRL reports that the notice of the Report and Order has now been published in the Federal Register. Unless an objection is raised by January 2 that the Commission finds to deserve its consideration, the following four Part 97 provisions will be deleted as of February 10, 2026:

1. § 97.27. This provision is duplicative of a statutory provision related to the FCC’s right to modify station licenses.
2. § 97.29. This provision specified an obsolete procedure to replace paper licenses. ARRL proposed deleting this section in comments filed earlier this year.
3. § 97.315 (b)(2). This obsolete provision grandfathered HF amplifiers purchased before April 28, 1978 by an amateur radio operator for use at that operator's station, and grandfathered those manufactured before April 28, 1978, for which a marketing waiver was issued.

4. § 97.521(b) and Appendix 2. This rule and appendix relate to obsolete VEC regions.

"To the Moon, Alice!"

President Donald Trump wants Americans back on the moon before he leaves office.

The president issued an executive order on December 18, calling for a crewed mission to the moon by 2028 and the beginnings of a “permanent lunar outpost” by 2030. He also ordered the deployment of nuclear reactors to space and the moon’s surface and laid out plans for developing a “commercial pathway” to replace the International Space Station by 2030.

NASA’s Artemis program, launched in 2017 during Trump’s first term, is already working to restart lunar missions. Artemis III, which would send astronauts to the moon’s south polar region, is currently scheduled for mid-2027, though that timeline could change.

Several more crewed missions to the moon are expected to take place over the following years.

The space agency’s long-term goal is to eventually use the moon as a bridge to Mars.

Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other aerospace and technology companies are developing components and vehicles for the Artemis project.

The White House said a return to the moon is needed to help capitalize on economic opportunities and to maintain U.S. hegemony in space. It listed more accurate weather forecasts, improved navigation technology, better timing services for precision agriculture, and global satellite-enabled internet access as likely benefits of continued investment in space-related technologies.

The administration also cited the need to develop space-based warfighting capabilities and protect “critical space assets.”

No human has set foot on the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The U.S. is still the only country to have successfully landed astronauts on the lunar surface.

Key elements of the Artemis Executive Order are:

The Gift of the Shillelagh

This Christmas, my grandson Carter gifted me with one of my most prized possessions, a new shillelagh, the traditional Irish walking stick (and much more).  The shillelagh is an Irish symbol of strength, heritage, and cultural identity. 

When I was a kid, we had a small shillelagh hanging around the house, but we kids were never supposed to play with it or otherwise "mess with it".  When asked why, the old man would just grin knowingly, leading me to suspect that he had, in the past, used it for "other purposes".

The Secret Morse Code Pill (You've Been Warned)

Reprinted from KE9V.Net 

"I was licensed in 1959 having been bitten by the radio bug when I was a just a wisp of a boy. I spent every possible spare moment building gear, antennas, and learning the ways of radio. At some point fairly early in my journey, I fell in with a bunch of 4’s who met on 75 meter phone almost every night for long-winded late night bull sessions. We all lived within a five-hundred mile circle except for one fellow who told us his name was “LG” – just letters, no name – and when asked, he would swear on his mother’s grave that they weren’t his initials, it was just his ‘name’.

That caused a few of us to privately wonder about the character of a man without a real name but LG was a nice enough fellow except that on most nights he would ask everyone in the roundtable to open their refrigerator and look carefully at our bottles of milk.

He wanted us to report back on the color of the caps and the type of milk. I couldn’t see much sense in it though LG was insistent. He was working on a theory that enemy spies were signaling each other about big events by changing certain colors. For instance, if 2-percent milk usually had a green cap, but was suddenly switched to blue, then that meant that something bad was soon to happen.

A Ham's Night Before Christmas

 

'Twas the night before Christmas,  and all through two-meters,  

Not a signal was keying up any repeaters.

The antennas reached up from the tower, quite high,  

To catch the weak signals that bounced from the sky.

The children, Technicians, took their HT's to bed,  

And dreamed of the day they'd be Extras, instead.

Mom put on her headphones, I plugged in the key,  

And we tuned 40 meters for that rare ZK3.

When the meter was pegged by a signal with power.  

It smoked a small diode, and I swear, shook the tower.

Mom yanked off her phones, and with all she could muster  

Logged a spot of the signal on the DX PacketCluster,

While I ran to the window and peered up at the sky,  

To see what could generate RF that high.