GDACS has been reporting for the last week that Tropical Cyclone NARELLE, affecting the North-eastern coastline of Australia, has now moved along the Northern seaboard of Australia, and has finally made landfall again on the central-western coast.

On 27 March at 06:00 UTC its centre was located 55 km south of Coral Bay and 140 km north of Carnarvon, with maximum sustained winds of 150 km/h (tropical cyclone) and with gusts of up to 205 km/h.

Media reports indicate that, after crossing the northern Northern Territory, flooding occurred, particularly due to the overflow of the Katherine River.

NARELLE is expected to weaken rapidly on 27-28 March as it progresses quickly south-southeast over land, with impacts extending to the Central West and then further inland and south across the South West Land Division of Western Australia.

During the next 48 hours very heavy rainfall, destructive winds and storm surge are predicted over most of western and south-western Western Australia. Tropical-cyclone warnings are in effect in Western Australia.

Brian Jacobs, ZS6YZ, National Director of HAMNET tells me that the Northern Cape division has a new Director, in the person of Johan Britz ZR3JB, and that his deputy divisional director will be Peet Lotriet ZS3PL. On behalf of you all, I wish Johan and Peet a successful tenure in Division 3, and hope that they will be able to activate as many of the Div 3 hams as possible, to make it a dynamic and successful region.

And Sasolburg Amateur Radio Club has had a busy weekend, assisting with the annual SASOL Marathon. Members from both Gauteng and the Free State have been assisting at the race. Riaan tells me they are experimenting with a new technology in the form of a single frequency repeater, and we look forward to a report-back from Sasolburg in the next week or so.

Here’s a drastic piece of news. Writing in universetoday.com, Mark Thompson says we are slowing our planet down. The length of a day on Earth changes constantly, nudged by the Moon’s gravitational pull, shifting winds in the atmosphere, and slow churning movements deep within the planet. It always has. Day length is, in a sense, a living measurement and one that ebbs and flows with the rhythms of a restless, dynamic world. But something new is happening.

A study just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth by researchers at the University of Vienna and ETH Zurich has found that our days are currently getting longer at a rate unprecedented in the past 3.6 million years and the primary cause seems to be human driven climate change!                                

The mechanism proposed is simple. As global temperatures rise, polar ice sheets and mountain glaciers melt, pouring water into the oceans and raising sea levels. That water spreads outward from the poles toward the equator, redistributing mass across the planet. Think of a figure skater who pulls their arms in tight to spin faster. When they stretch their arms out, they slow down. Earth is currently stretching its arms. The result is a measurable slowing of Earth’s rotation currently lengthening our day by 1.33 milliseconds per century. That sounds trivial but it isn’t.

What makes this finding remarkable is not just the number, but its context. To find out whether anything similar had happened in the past, the researchers turned to an unlikely archive, the fossilised shells of tiny single celled marine organisms called benthic foraminifera, which lived on the ocean floor millions of years ago. The chemical composition of their shells encodes records of ancient sea levels. From those sea levels, the team could mathematically reconstruct how the length of the day has changed across 3.6 million years of Earth history.

The answer was unambiguous. Nothing in that entire geological record comes close to what is happening now. Only once, roughly two million years ago, did the rate of change even approach today’s values and it was still slower. Every other period in that vast sweep of time saw Earth’s rotation influenced by natural forces alone. What sets the present moment apart is that the dominant force is no longer natural at all.

The conclusion is that the current rate of day lengthening can be attributed primarily to human activity. As lead author Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi of the University of Vienna put it, this rapid increase in day length implies that the rate of modern climate change has been unprecedented at least since the late Pliocene, 3.6 million years ago.

There are consequences however; spacecraft navigation, satellite positioning, GPS systems, and even computing infrastructure all depend on accurate knowledge of Earth’s rotation rate. As that rate changes, so does the need to correct for it, creating a cascade of recalibration challenges for the systems our modern world quietly relies upon.

Looking ahead, the numbers only get larger. Under high greenhouse gas emission scenarios, the day could be lengthening by 2.62 milliseconds per century by 2080. By that point, climate change is projected to be influencing Earth’s rotation more strongly than the Moon itself. The Moon has been slowing our planet for billions of years. We have apparently managed to compete with it in just a few decades.

And NASA’s newsletter of yesterday says that their ARTEMIS ll mission, the first crewed flight of the Artemis programme, is targeted for launch no earlier than 22h24 UTC on Wednesday 1^st April, with a two-hour launch window that evening.

Real time mission coverage will stream continuously on NASA’s YouTube channel. As bandwidth allows, NASA will also offer a dedicated feed showing views from the Orion spacecraft. Daily mission status briefings from NASA’s Johnson Space Center will begin on April 2, with the exception of April 6 due to lunar flyby operations. All times may shift depending on the actual launch time and mission activities.

Throughout the mission, the crew will take part in live conversations, known as downlinks. NASA will post the exact schedule for these downlink events on the Artemis blog.

Artemis II builds on the success of the un-crewed Artemis I in 2022, and will demonstrate a broad range of capabilities needed on deep space missions. The Artemis II test flight will be NASA’s first mission with crew aboard the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and the Orion spacecraft.

You may remember that Artemis is the Greek goddess of the hunt, wilderness, wild animals, virginity, and childbirth. She is the daughter of Zeus and Leto, the twin sister of Apollo, and a prominent Olympian deity often depicted with a bow and arrows. Artemis is renowned as a fierce protector of her sacred spaces, young women, and animals.

Let us hope that Artemis will protect her 4 astronauts as they do an orbit around the moon and return to earth safely.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

Greg Mossop G0DUB, IARU region 1 emergency communications coordinator has issued a statement regarding the ITU. He says:

“The ITU have updated the recommendations to the Amateur Service for how they would like our service to prepare for emergencies. This Recommendation is something I have referred to in presentations for many years but things have changed a bit in this version. The changes are:

‘1 that administrations should encourage the development of amateur service and amateur-satellite service networks capable of providing radio communications in the event of natural disasters or other emergencies, and that these networks are available when called upon by appropriate authorities;

‘2 that these amateur and amateur-satellite networks should be capable of operation in the absence of other radio communications networks and capable of operating from temporary locations, (as required) using local generator or battery based power supplies when public grid power is not available;

‘3 that amateur organizations should be encouraged:

‘3.1 to promote the design of robust organizational structures and technology systems capable of providing reliable radio communications during disasters and relief operations;

‘3.2 to train regularly so that the necessary skills to provide an effective communications support are developed and maintained for deployment during emergency events.’

“I have highlighted the changes in bold text and the changes put more focus on us being able to deliver and to be seen to regularly train. The requirements are now not just for natural disasters but ‘for other emergencies’ and having no grid power is also called out specially.”

Greg hopes further that there is enough here though to have some good conversations in our countries.

Thanks to him for the communique, and apologies to any who might have already heard me report on this.

Writing for en.clickpetroeoegas.com.br Alisson Ficher is reporting that a scientific network in the Arctic is bringing together thousands of antennas to map the ionosphere and reveal how solar particles produce the aurora borealis, a luminous phenomenon linked to space weather that can interfere with satellites, communications, and electrical systems across the planet.

Norway is making progress in building the EISCAT 3D, a next-generation scientific radar designed to observe the upper atmosphere and near-Earth space environment with greater precision.

The core of the system is located in Skibotn, in the north of the country, and encompasses approximately 10 antennas in a phased array arrangement. The structure was designed to monitor, almost in real time, variations in the ionosphere and the physical processes linked to the formation of the aurora borealis.

This phenomenon also serves as an indicator of risks to satellites, GPS navigation, radio communications, and power grids. The project does not operate in isolation.

In addition to the main facility in Norwegian territory, the EISCAT 3D integrates receivers in Finland and Sweden, forming an infrastructure focused on monitoring the Arctic sky.

Auroras appear when energetic particles from the Sun interact with Earth’s magnetic field and gases in the upper atmosphere. When these particles collide with oxygen and nitrogen, they release energy in the form of light. This process produces hues that vary according to altitude and the type of atmospheric excitation.

In general, emissions associated with the aurora appear in bands of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere that extend from about 80 to 600 kilometers. The phenomenon is particularly common at altitudes between approximately 100 and 400 kilometers.

In practice, the radar system emits radio waves and analyzes the signal scattering by encountering free electrons in the ionospheric plasma.

Based on this feedback, researchers are able to estimate electron density, temperatures and velocities of plasma.

It also becomes possible to map movements that help explain how the Sun’s energy is distributed over the Polar Regions.

This type of radar allows for the measurement of parameters that were previously observed in a more limited way, such as electric fields, neutral winds, and particle flows during auroral events.

Thanks to Alisson Ficher for the report.

And Star News, reporting from Canterbury, New Zealand reports that a large number of police, army and other emergency personnel in helicopters and boats are set to descend on a Canterbury lake township this weekend.

A multi-agency search and rescue training exercise called Operation Oasis is set to take place in the Tekapo area from Friday to Sunday. The complex, multi-phase exercise is designed to test search techniques, field skills, and fatigue management in realistic conditions. More than 200 search and rescue specialists from across Canterbury will be taking part in the exercise.

This will include personnel from the police, Coastguard, Surf Life Saving New Zealand, Land Search and Rescue, Amateur Radio Emergency Communications, Alpine Rescue Canterbury, Hato Hone St John, and the New Zealand Defence Force.

“Members of the public will see increased activity in the area, with use of helicopters, boats, and Search and Rescue personnel and equipment,” a police spokesperson said.

“This is a planned, routine training exercise and the public should not be alarmed.

“We appreciate and thank the community for their understanding and support as our teams work to maintain and enhance their capability to respond to emergencies.”

Sounds like the type of exercise we in South African provinces ought to be holding.

And itbrief.asia says that Taiwan Mobile has restored telecoms services in eastern Taiwan after Typhoon Ragasa cut a key network route, and using a laser-based wireless link across a damaged river crossing.

The operator worked with Singapore-based Transcelestial and local systems integrator dBTech after the Mataian River Bridge in Hualien County collapsed in torrential rain. A communications route running beneath the bridge was severed when the structure failed.

Engineers installed a 1.25-kilometre connection using Transcelestial’s CENTAURI equipment. The link spanned the Mataian River between two sites, bypassing the damaged infrastructure.

Repairs to the bridge and the damaged route were expected to take close to six months because of the scale of reconstruction required. By contrast, the temporary laser link was deployed and made operational within days, restoring service without waiting for bridge works or ground access.

As the saying goes: “Where there is a will, there’s a way!”

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

I believe it was Julius Caesar’s wife, who first made quite a thing about the 15^th of March, known in those times as the Ides of March, warning her husband not to go to the forum on that day, because bad things happen on the Ides of March. Well, we all know how that turned out, but subsequently, Friday the 13^th seems to have been labelled as more treacherous, and we’ve just had two of those in consecutive months. I sincerely hope none of you were struck by the dreaded Friday the 13^th, and that today the Ides of March will not be worse!

Not doing too well weather-wise at the moment, around the world, are Gabon, the USA, Columbia, Ecuador, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Ethiopia and Australia, where severe weather and flooding are causing power and communications cuts, and removals to  evacuation centres, with the attendant and associated anxieties.

nbcnews.com notes that Japan marked the 15th anniversary of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster on its northeastern coast this week. The magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, ravaged parts of the region, directly caused more than 22,000 deaths, and forced nearly half a million people to flee their homes, most of them due to tsunami damage.

Some 160,000 people fled their homes in Fukushima because of the radiation spewed from the tsunami-hit Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. About 26,000 of them haven’t returned because they resettled elsewhere, their home towns remain off-limits or they have lingering concerns about radiation.

Japan observed a moment of silence at 2:46 p.m. local time on Wednesday, the moment the quake occurred 15 years earlier. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, at a ceremony in Fukushima, pledged to do the utmost to accelerate the region’s recovery within the next five years and to reinforce “the valuable lessons we learned from the huge sacrifice of the disaster.”

Takaichi has pushed to accelerate reactor restarts and sought to bolster nuclear power as a stable energy source, in line with the major reversal of policy in 2022 that ended a decade-long nuclear phase-out plan.

Some residents in the tsunami-ravaged areas walked down to the coast early in the morning to pray for their loved ones and others whose remains are still missing.

More than 1 million homes, offices and schools were damaged or destroyed in the quake and tsunami in Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima and other coastal areas. Key infrastructure has been rebuilt, but communities and local economies have been slow to recover.

Gazetaexpress.com is reporting on the new (random) numbers station which is audible on shortwave (or HF) frequencies. They say that the radio signal first began broadcasting on February 28. On a noisy shortwave frequency, almost twice a day — early morning and evening according to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) — a man’s voice speaking Farsi, the language of Persia, is heard, counting out a series of seemingly random numbers.

The numbers are read at different time periods, followed by a pause during which the word “tavajjoh,” which translates as “attention,” is said three times.

The mystery of this transmission has puzzled many in the global community of amateur radio operators who analyze suspicious signals. They have exchanged notes and tips on the signal, who could be behind them, and what there purpose might be.

Starting on 4^th March, the signal began to be jammed, with a deafening electronic noise making it almost impossible to hear the numbers. The original transmission stopped for a period of time and then moved to another shortwave frequency.

“It’s interesting because it started to be jammed on the initial frequency,” said Akin Fernandez, who is widely considered an authority on the old coded radio technology known as “numbered channels.”

Regardless of who is broadcasting and who is blocking it, this mysterious broadcast is a throwback to another era, before the digital encryption widely used in apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and others.

The transmission is called a “numbers station” — a Cold War-era tool that uses radio transmissions and traditional cryptology to send secret messages — usually to spies around the world.

The concept is this: using a random series of numbers, generated by some mechanical or electronic device or something more sophisticated, one person can send an encrypted message to another person who possesses a decoder, often called a “one-time pad.”

The code of the numbers stations is “completely unbreakable,” said Fernandez, who more than two decades ago released a four-CD audio compilation containing hundreds of recordings from around the world, called “The Conet Project.” It is considered the “Bible” for numbers station enthusiasts.

“The numeric keys used are completely random. There are no mathematical operations that can be used to brute force them,” he said. “And even if the answer is found, for example in correct English, it is not necessarily understandable.”

“You can’t understand anything from a random set of letters or numbers except their length. However the length of the message is not the content of the information being transmitted,” he said.

“But it is possible to get an idea of ​​the stations’ purpose from the length of time they are active and the noise they transmit if there is no text message.”

According to Priyom, a blog run by radio enthusiasts, the Persian-language broadcast is the first new numbers station in years. Priyom was the first to identify, catalogue, and analyze the signal, which they have dubbed “V32.” American journalist Seth Hettena also mentioned the signal in a blog post on March 4.

The group says its members scattered around the world have managed to triangulate the origin of the signal transmitter: “Somewhere in an area that includes northern Italy, Switzerland, Western Germany, Eastern France, Belgium and the Netherlands”, they say.

Thanks to gazetaexpress.com for these excerpts from their report.

Well, having survived two Friday the 13^th’s and the Ides of March, I’m sure it will be an easy matter for all of you to find something green to wear on Tuesday the 17^th, to practice your best “Oirish Accent”, to be sure, and to go looking for the best source of good Irish Guinness to celebrate your narrow escape.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR, hastily cultivating a shamrock in my garden, and reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

The Herald Online says that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region is moving to strengthen its emergency telecommunications systems as climate-induced disasters continue to threaten lives, infrastructure and livelihoods across Southern Africa.

ICT, Postal and Courier Services Deputy Minister Dingumuzi Phuti said robust and coordinated telecommunications systems were critical in ensuring effective disaster response. He was speaking at the official opening of the International Telecommunication union (ITU)-SADC Emergency Telecommunications and Early Warning for All (EW4All) Regional Capacity Development Workshop in Harare on Wednesday. The workshop is a collaborative initiative between the SADC Secretariat, ITU and the Government of Zimbabwe.

“This collaborative effort marks a significant milestone in our shared commitment to enhancing emergency telecommunications capabilities throughout the SADC region,” said Deputy Minister Phuti.

He said the region remains highly vulnerable to climate-induced disasters such as tropical cyclones, floods and droughts, which often result in loss of life, destruction of property, crop damage and disruption of critical information infrastructure.

“In times of crisis, local telecommunications and ICT systems can be severely disrupted, leaving communities without vital communication channels when they need them most,” Deputy Minister Phuti said.

“Timely, reliable and coordinated telecommunications are the backbone of effective disaster response.

“They enable governments, humanitarian agencies and first responders to act swiftly and decisively to save lives.”

Deputy Minister Phuti said telecommunications play a central role across all four stages of disaster management — mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery — but acknowledged that several SADC member states still face gaps in preparedness.

“Issues such as lack of harmonised standard operating procedures, limited interoperability among systems, delays in supporting emergency telecommunications equipment and weak coordination mechanisms during emergencies continue to hinder our collective efforts,” he said.

Thanks to heraldonline.co.zw for this report.

From Popular Mechanics comes a report that nuclear power has the potential to help cut humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, but scientists are still working on how to deal with its radioactive leftovers.

The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility received more than $8 million this month to develop technologies that can drastically reduce radioactivity and spent fuel, producing usable electricity in the process.

The facility relies on superconducting radiofrequency and a pure niobium cavity to accelerate a proton beam that knocks neutrons loose from a target material, and interacts with nuclear waste that converts into more manageable isotopes.

“These neutrons will interact with unwanted isotopes from nuclear power stations and convert them into more manageable isotopes that you can either try out for some beneficial use or bury underground,” Rongli Geng, the principal investigator from Jefferson Lab, said in a press statement. “Instead of having a lifetime of 100,000 years in storage, for example, you can shorten the storage years down to 300.”

The process also creates an immense amount of heat that the engineers hope can be converted into usable electricity.

Sounds like a win-win situation, doesn’t it!

Two or three years ago, I reported on a spacecraft called DART that was sent up to collide with a little asteroid called Dimorphos, which was orbiting its larger sibling Didymos, to see if a planned collision could change the trajectory of the little rock, and which could have implications for protecting Earth from future asteroid strikes.

Within a month, researchers showed that the impact shortened Dimorphos’ 12-hour orbit by 32 minutes. Most of that change came from the impact itself. Some of it came from flying impact debris, which gave Dimorphos a little kick in the opposite direction of its motion.

Some of the rocks knocked off of Dimorphos fled the vicinity completely, escaping the gravitational influence of the Dimorphos–Didymos pair, says planetary defense researcher Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. Those rocky runaways took some momentum away from the duo and changed their joint motion around the sun.

To figure out how much that motion was affected, astronomers watched the asteroids pass in front of distant stars, dimming some of the stars’ light like a tiny eclipse. These blinks, called stellar occultations, can be visible from anywhere on Earth and are predictable in advance.

“Oftentimes it’s amateur astronomers going out in the middle of nowhere to track Didymos based on predictions,” Makadia says. “There was an observer who drove two days each way into the Australian outback to get these measurements.”

Makadia and colleagues gathered 22 such measurements taken from October 2022 to March 2025. Calculating how far off occultation timings were from predictions revealed that the asteroids’ orbit around the sun was about 150 milliseconds slower than before the DART impact.

The result could be confirmed later this year, when the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft arrives at Didymos and Dimorphos for follow-up observations.

Didymos and Dimorphos are not a threat to Earth, Makadia says, and weren’t even before DART. But knowing how a deliberate impact changes one asteroid’s orbit can help make defense plans against another, “in case we need to do a kinetic impact for real.”

Thank you to Lisa Grossman, writing in Science News, for this report.

With apologies for the gruff voice, this is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

A magnitude 5.3 earthquake struck Bangladesh on Friday the 27^th at 07h52 UTC and at a depth of about 10km below ground, in the Khulna area. About 5000 people were exposed to severe shaking, and the humanitarian impact is expected to be at a medium level. 180000 people live within a 10km radius of the epicentre. At the time of writing no casualty figures were available.

theguardian.com in Australia says that the population will soon receive intrusive alerts on their smartphones to warn of impending emergencies as governments overhaul warning systems for natural disasters and other serious events.

The AusAlert system will be rolled out through a series of trials from June, replacing state-based text messaging systems which often struggle because of demand in major emergencies. Alerts will be sent for bushfires, floods, biosecurity threats and public safety incidents like shootings. The messages will link users to more information from official sources online.

Instead of text messages, AusAlert will appear as a home screen message on phones in designated geographic areas. The alerts will have the capability to be targeted down to individual streets, with the highest-level threat alert accompanied by a loud, intrusive tone.

Alerts will be received by anyone with a phone in the specific location inside a specific time range, for between 10 minutes and 24 hours.

A national test, set to send alerts to about 23 million smartphones, is planned for 27^th July at 2pm, Eastern Time. As many as 90% of phones in Australia are expected to receive them.

The system is designed to work for most phones released since 2019. Testing is being conducted for interactions between the system and smartwatches, car-play systems and other devices.

Users will not be able to opt out of the highest-level threat alert. Opt-out functionality will be available for lower level threats, known as priority alerts.

AusAlert is expected to be fully operational by October, before the 2026-27 high-risk weather season. Existing state-based emergency text alert systems will be decommissioned by July 2027.

Thanks to theguardian.com for these paragraphs.

In an interesting article from Cuba, published on Friday, a father-and-son radio amateur pair was able to help a doctor help his patient. On the 18^th February, a doctor from a council polyclinic attempted to contact the integrated Medical Emergencies System, because he had a 12 year old patient with abdominal pain and fever, and suspected appendicitis.

Unfortunately, due to a fuel shortage and major power failure they were experiencing in Cuba at the time, the telephone base system was dead.  Without a coordinated ambulance or operational conventional channels, the doctor went to the home of the amateur radio operators.

Although their devices also had no battery due to the blackout caused by the fuel shortage, they managed to activate the radios, thanks to a battery from a motorcycle borrowed from a neighbour.

The general call was received from Santiago de Cuba by CL8YDY, who was able to connect with the emergency system.

In less than an hour, arrangements were made for the patient’s transfer to the hospital, where the girl underwent successful surgery.

The article in the periodical notes that the performance of father and son once again demonstrates the value of amateur radio in critical situations and the commitment of citizens who take the initiative to provide what should have been guaranteed by state institutions.

Thanks to cibercuba.com for the story.

Hamsci.org has announced the 9^th annual Ham SCI Workshop, which will take place on 14^th and 15^th March, at Central Connecticut State University, and in conjunction with the ARRL.

This year’s theme, “Discovering Science through Ham Radio“, celebrates the community’s achievements, including Personal Space Weather Station deployments, meteor scatter propagation studies and the promotion of WSPR as a propagation sensing tool. The workshop is expected to feature more than 50 poster and oral presentations, plus invited tutorials, and a banquet with a keynote address by a prominent member of the community.

The program will focus on the latest findings, strategies, and best practices in ionospheric science.  It has been designed to bring together the amateur radio and professional science communities. Anyone with an interest in these subjects is welcome to attend. Most speakers and attendees will participate in person. However, a virtual option will also be available. 

Radio amateurs in Cape Town were kept occupied yesterday in two different fields.

Saturday the 28th of February saw the inaugural Blind Navigator’s Rally for the 2026 season hosted by the Table View Lions and the Sea Point Lions. The event was run from the WPMC Clubhouse at the Killarney race track and saw 34 volunteer drivers with their blind or partially sighted navigators take on a two hour route that took them all the way to Atlantis and the surrounding areas before returning to the Clubhouse at Killarney.

The event is an annual highlight for the navigators as the championship trophy for the previous year is also awarded here. This year’s route was particularly challenging due to the road quality and end-of-month traffic congesting the roads. Eventually all of the participants made their way back to the Clubhouse where a fish-and-chips lunch was served and the results were announced.

The winning team was made up of a first-time driver and his veteran blind navigator – the first time in the 59 years of the BNR that a new driver went home with the honours.

The BNR organising committee also noted the sad passing of the cornerstone of rallying, namely Roger Manton ZR1AKK last year, and their consequent restructuring of the committee to fill the humongous shoes now left empty.

 Many thanks to Davy ZR1FR who manned the control radio, Johann ZS1JM who performed sweep duties, and Jannie ZS1JFK who provided radio assistance to the zero car during the event.

Please do consider assisting with future BNRs as these are a great, selfless way to assist with the safety and success of these wonderful outings. The next BNR will be held in Tulbagh on Saturday 21 March 2026.

Thank you Jannie ZS1JFK for providing the report so soon after the race.

The other event yesterday was the annual Mega-Fleamarket held at the Cape Town Amateur Radio Centre clubhouse in Rondebosch in the morning. As is usually the case, sellers are amateurs selling either their surplus stuff, or sometimes kits or modules for inclusion in homebrew activities undertaken by the buyers.

Curious would-be purchasers came from all clubs in the Cape, and it was a good excuse to greet old friends again, and enjoy light refreshments sold by the club. Luckily the weather played the game, and a good time was had by all. Thank you to the CTARC for hosting the event, and to the workers from the club who made it all happen.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.