Sixth in the World, First in the Pool

Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico — July 2026

Every operator knows the feeling, and none of us can fully explain it to anyone who doesn't. It's a random Tuesday. You're at the radio at sunrise with coffee, and the long path opens — some corner of the Earth you can't see and will maybe never visit comes rolling out of the speaker like it's parked in your driveway. And for a minute you just sit there and believe in your antenna again.

That feeling is why one hundred of the best operators alive flew to England last weekend. And it's why Ken, KP4AA, and I spent the same twenty-four hours on a hilltop in Puerto Rico, playing radio like we were twelve years old.

The view from the pool. This matters to the story.

First, The Stage — Because Some Of You Were Twelve More Recently Than Others

If you're new here: the World Radiosport Team Championship is ham radio's Olympics, held every four years. Fifty two-operator teams, flown to one country, given identical stations — same antennas, same power, same everything — so the only variable left is the operator. This year it ran from tents scattered across the English countryside, inside the 24-hour IARU HF Championship. We told the founder's story here: A Toast to the Founder — Danny, K7SS, who dreamed the whole thing up in Seattle in 1990.

Here's the part the rulebook doesn't say: we've known most of those hundred operators since we were kids. Not "internet friends." Real ones — four solar cycles of schedules and insults, weddings and pileups. When the contest started at 1200Z Saturday, the bands filled with the fists and voices of people we grew up with. The whole fraternity, loud at once.

So Ken and I entered from KP4AA — Multi-Single, High Power, two guys, one transmitter — and ran the same twenty-four hours our friends were running, four thousand miles away.

The Scoreboard Part, Quickly

2,813 QSOs. 1,912 unique stations. Just over three million points claimed — and, it turns out, a new Puerto Rican record for the category. Sixth in the world when the dust settled on the live boards — so far. Log checking runs for months, clean logs climb, and ours never left the chair. We like our chances of a spot or three. Seventy-one percent of it on CW, because some habits are older than the license.

And you don't have to take my word for any of it: we turned the whole log into an interactive replay. Watch the entire 24 hours race by, hour by hour — press play, or step through with a coffee.

What The Log Can Prove (And What It Can't)

I want to tell you three stories from the weekend, and the fun part is the logbook backs up every one of them.

The bands were breathing. Solar flux was strong all weekend, but the F-layer had waves rolling through it — signals swung like 6-meter sporadic-E, S9 to gone in seconds and back again. Here's the physics in one breath: those are traveling ionospheric disturbances, ripples in the reflecting layer that sweep the skip zone across a station like a searchlight. The operator's answer isn't better hardware. It's patience: the guy who vanished mid-exchange floats back up in half a minute. Hold the frequency. Keep the exchange short. Take the peak when it comes, because the ocean is about to roll.

The nap run. Around midnight local, Ken went down for a few hours of sleep, and I found Europe and North Africa on SSB, everyone armchair-loud. The log says 240 contacts in two hours — four a minute, sunrise sweeping across their continent while our hilltop was dark. A couple hundred short conversations with the other side of the ocean, one after another, every one of them booming. Openings like that are why we do this. I think a lot of guys on the other end will remember that one too. (And the 3830 soapboxes agree — ops all over North America wrote in surprised how late 20 meters stayed open to Europe that night. We weren't imagining it.)

The 80-meter vigil — and this is the one that gave me chills. Near the end of the night I stayed on 80 meters longer than the rate justified. Summer static, band closing, sun already up in England. And here's the thing about the fifty WRTC stations: by rule, they have no spotting networks. No cluster. No packet. If they want a multiplier, they have to tune across the band and find it with their ears — in the dark, against the noise, the old way.

Twenty of the fifty tents found me.

Read that again. Twenty teams, hunting a Puerto Rico multiplier across a noisy 80-meter band by hand, before their sunrise slammed the door. A few made it into the log so much louder than the rest that you could hear the antennas earning their keep. I stood by until the last of them faded, because when men are hunting you in the dark with nothing but ears, you do not leave early.

By the end of the weekend we had worked all fifty WRTC stations — thirty of them on three or more bands, four of them on five bands. And somewhere in those pileups we started recognizing the family: I heard Rich, NN3W, on sideband and knew a USA team had that call. A CW fist that could only be Dan, N6MJ. You can seal the callsigns, but you can't anonymize forty years of friendship.

The Ferrari And The Shopping Carts

The office. Note the timer on screen, upper right — the 10-minute countdown. That traffic light haunted us for twenty-four hours.

One honest gripe, because this is a real review of a real weekend: the Multi-Single category's 10-minute rule — you must wait ten minutes between band or mode changes — is like being handed a Ferrari and told to drive it through small towns, traffic lights, shopping carts, and pedestrians. You can see the opening on another band. You know it's there. And you sit at the red light watching the countdown. It's the rule, and everyone runs the same gauntlet — but boring is the enemy of a hobby, and that rule flirts with it. There, I said it. Send your rebuttals; I'll read them all.

The Part About Believing In Your Antenna

Here's the teaching, and it's the same lesson from both sides of the Atlantic.

At WRTC, they make every antenna identical so that only skill decides. At home, nobody levels anything — the sky is what's identical, and the antenna is the variable you control. Same physics, opposite application.

But the deeper thing — the thing the 80-meter vigil proved — is that the antenna is where belief lives in this hobby. When a station comes back to your first call across an ocean, when a tent in England finds your signal in the static by ear, when long path opens on a random Tuesday: that's the moment every operator quietly renews the faith. Not in magic. In metal, height, and honest physics doing exactly what they promised.

That's the whole reason we build what we build. But this weekend wasn't about that. This weekend was two guys on a hilltop, a swimming pool at one in the afternoon (operator rotation is sacred; the pool was excellent), and the sound of a hundred old friends being loud at the same time.

Ham radio is fun again. It was never not.

Want to chase the results? Replay our 24 hours here, hour by hour. The WRTC story and team-callsign reveal live on our WRTC 2026 board, the full IARU field is at contestonlinescore.com, and the 3830 reflector is full of war stories like this one. Go read them all — every log tells one.

73,
Jon, KL2A
(second op, pool inspector, KP4AA — IARU HF 2026)