RAC Names Recipients of Amateur of the Year Award 2025

February 25, 2026Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC) announced the recipients of the Amateur of the Year Award for 2025. This year’s honorees, Fred (VE1FA) and Helen (VA1YL) Archibald, are recognized for their years of dedication to the amateur radio community.

Fred and Helen Archibald have been pillars of Amateur Radio in Canada for decades. While the award traditionally reflects contributions within a given year, their sustained excellence in 2025 – combined with a lifetime of service – made them compelling joint recipients.

In addition to being avid organizers of many DXpeditions, VE1FA is an instructor and technological innovator and VA1YL has served as President of the Canadian Ladies Amateur Radio Association. Learn more about Fred and Helen’s contributions to ham radio on the RAC website.

Source: Radio Amateurs of Canada open_in_new RAC Awards

Community HamClock Backend Server Now Available

February 24, 2026The first known community backend server for HamClock is now available for all HamClock users. The project, hamclock.com, is free for anyone to use and will keep existing HamClock installs running indefinitely.

Major work beyond OHB includes: rewriting the VOACAP propagation engine with cubic interpolation, building weather pressure maps in both millibar and inHg units at five resolutions, adding aurora map generation, real-time PSK Reporter spot data, Kp index from NOAA SWPC, overhauling satellite TLE tracking, and hardening the entire server for production use serving 1,600+ HamClocks.

With the passing of HamClock creator Elwood Downey (WB0OEW), HamClock will stop working in June unless users point their installations to a new backend service. Updating existing HamClock installations is a simple task. Users have two options, updating their hosts file, or updating the command used to start HamClock. Both require only simple text changes.

Hamclock.com is run by Bruce Edrich (W4BAE) and is built upon open-hamclock-backend.

Headlines from Amateur Radio Daily are made available to HamClock via open-hamclock-backed.

Source: HamClock.com open_in_new HamClock