Contest News

WRTC special activities for 2026

June 30, 2026 -- WRTC is essentially the Olympics of Amateur Radio Contesting - and is almost upon us! On 8th July 2026, competitors that have qualified to represent their Qualification Area (unlike the Olympics, which has participants competing for their country) will arrive in the United Kingdom to prepare for this once every 4 year event. The host nation changes each time and, this time, for the 10th WRTC, it's being held in the UK! There will be 50 teams of two, each with an assigned referee. Each will be allocated an HF operating site in South East England, where they will take part in a 24 hour SSB/CW contest (the IARU HF Championship) over the weekend of 11th/12th July. So, WRTC is kind of a contest within an existing contest.

This is your opportunity to work these special stations and apply for your award!

The WRTC contest will be live on a dedicated online platform provided by World Radio League. This is a live scoreboard where you can track your favourite team in real time. Also, when you contact one of the special WRTC stations, you can see it on the WRL platform. What's more, you can check which of the 50 WRTC stations you still need to contact. Can you work all 50 of them? If you're an SSB operator, there are 250 possible QSOs across 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10m. Similarly, there are 250 possible QSOs if you are a CW operator. If you are both an SSB and CW operator, 500 QSOs are possible with WRTC stations alone!

Certificates will be downloadable after the contest, which will display your total number of QSOs made with these special callsigns. There are different award tiers depending on how many you contact.

View full details of the award programme

So, what are the special callsigns? Well, we can't say just yet! These will be announced on Thursday 9th July. You will find this on the WRTC website - www.wrtc2026.org - and also on our social media platforms by searching WRTC2026. You can be sure that these 50 callsigns will be all over the bands during this contest! See how many you can find!

A look at the World Radio League platform is a must. Visit www.WorldRadioLeague.com and sign up early for free to stay tuned when the live scoreboard page for WRTC goes live!

So, if you have the capability to be on the HF bands over the weekend of 11/12th July (from 12:00Z Sat - 12:00Z Sun), why not try to work as many of these special stations as you can! Many of the WRTC sites should be easy to work on the HF bands. The teams will be using yagi antennas on 10/15/20 meters and dipoles on 40 and 80 meters. They will run just 100 watts of output power, so they may not always be really loud. but, hopefully the propagation will be favourable. The exchange is signal report and ITU zone (so, if calling from the east of the USA, for example, "59, 8" on SSB and "599, 8" on CW would work).

We also want to promote the YouTube daily TV shows at 16.30z (17.30 BST) daily from 8th July, plus the contest livestream.

73,
The WRTC 2026 Team