It’s the end of the 52 Week Ham Radio Challenge for 2025, and what a journey it’s been! The final Christmas Wrap-up and New Year’s Radio Resolutions are below, but first, the results of the challenges from weeks 49-52:

49. Clean up your shack and post the most curious item you found.
50. Receive an APRS message or beacon
51. Write something about ham radio with public impact.
52. Create an Infographic or Webcomic!

Week 49 (1-7 Dec): Clean up your shack and post the most curious item you found.

I’m not sure I have anything truly curious and directly amateur radio related in here, but I dug out a selection of the odder things in the drawer, and have made up some awards to give them:

• The “Most unnecessarily tactical nonsense” award goes to the Bowman Manpack Data Terminal case, top-left. This was a cheap military surplus impulse buy, and I’ve had it for a while, looking for a radio kit to shove in there. (I think its original intended contents were this.) In my recent blog post “The QRP kit gets Smaller” I finally found one, and you can read all about it there.
• The “Why did I do this” award goes to that connector shown on the front of my FT-817, the “BNC (fucked) to BNC (not fucked) adapter”. The FT-817 was a cheap buy from an SK sale, and the front BNC socket had a bit of a plug’s centre conductor stuck in it that I couldn’t extract. Replacements for the socket weren’t available online at the time, and in any case were £30+. So, I bought a cheap Amazon right-angle connector and awkwardly trimmed the inner conductor of the plug end, millimetre by millimetre, with wirecutters until it fit. Now it’s on there, it’s never coming off.
• The “Never taking this through airport security” award goes of course to Plane/Sailing Portable. This is almost certainly the most suspicious-looking item I own, even including the tea strainer that looks like a Pikmin’s ballsack.
• Finally, the “Coolest waste of money” award goes to the Hackberry Pi, shown here displaying the Ham Challenge website as well as it can. I’ve no real idea why I bought this, it just looked cool. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W inside really limits its ability to run X11 and a desktop environment, much less a modern web browser, so it lives in the electronics junk drawer in the shack awaiting a use case some day.

Week 50 (8-14 Dec): Receive an APRS message or beacon

Well, this one is an easy win. Plane/Sailing is currently tracking 14 APRS contacts (anything for which it received a position data message in the last hour).

MB7VM up on Bell Hill is doing all the heavy lifting for me - I receive digipeated packets from it, but very rarely from anything else directly. Thanks to M0VPN for running it.

There are 186 APRS tracks in the database in total (this includes any fixed base stations for which it received position data within the last three months). The furthest track currently in the system is in the south of France. I’ll avoid naming and shaming the operator forever on the internet, because the reason their packet got quite so far is because they sent it as WIDE-7!

It seems there was a bit of a “lift” in conditions around 10-12 October, and a lot of the furthest tracks were received around that time. This includes packets received directly at MB7VM from Spain, Germany and Switzerland, plus a curious path from MB7UJD in East Anglia, via EI2MGP in Ireland, into MB7VM!

Earlier in the year, I also experimented with messaging on my TH-D74, sending and receiving POTA spots direct from the HT via APSPOT.

Week 51 (15-21 Dec): Write something about ham radio with public impact.

I couldn’t think of anything in particular to write in this specific week, so I’m going to blag it with my only published article this year—the page on Field Spotter that was published in the March 2025 edition of RadCom. If you have an RSGB membership, you can read it on page 51 of the online copy!

The Ham Challenge page also includes blogging as “writing with public impact”, so of course on that basis I’ve been ahead of the game all year. Including this one, I’ve blogged about the Ham Challenge itself 13 times in 2025, along with 39 other radio-related posts.

Week 52 (22-28 Dec): Create an Infographic or Webcomic!

I’m not sure if this counts as a real infographic, but one of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while is take the ham.guide Bandplan Generator and adapt and expand the default ITU Region 1 plan. I’ve done this by replacing its WRC-15 version of the 60m band with the larger but confusing UK allocations, and by adding various other frequencies such as FT8, WSPR, and JOTA recommended calling frequencies. The result is below.

You can click here for a bigger version of the image, click here to download it as a PDF, or click here to go to the bandplan generator with these settings preloaded. For reference, the PNG was generated from the PDF with the following command:

convert -density 150 "UK Bandplan - HF.pdf" -quality 90 -background white -alpha remove hfbandplan.png

I do find graphical bandplans fascinating. As someone who almost exclusively does SSB on HF or FM on V/UHF, I think of sub-bands that I can use, but until I see it drawn out in a picture I can never really visualise the size of the band and where my areas of interest lie within it.

Here’s the band plan for VHF and 70cm:

And the bigger version of the image, PDF, and bandplan generator link.

The Christmas Wrap-Up

That’s all for this round-up, and with it, the end of the 52-week Ham Challenge 2025. I think I can claim success on 41 out of 52 weeks—not a bad result, and as far as I can tell it’s the highest score this year.

The biggest driving force behind me doing so many of the challenges this year was my commitment to blogging about it. With 13 page templates set up in advance, and weekly reminders on my phone, I tried my best to avoid skipping a week. (At least, not without a fairly good reason). I’m not sure I’ll document next year’s progress as well as I have this year’s, especially if some of the challenges are similar—the blog page setup in particular was a bit of a faff.

Whether due to work, illness, or just a lack of enthusiasm, I didn’t quite manage to do 11 of the weeks’ challenges—some of them end up on my to-do list for 2026 below. However, the 41 successful weeks include a lot of exciting things. Without the Ham Challenge this year, I’d almost certainly have never exchanged QSL cards, taken part in a contest, tried Hellschreiber, tried to tune a wet piece of string, and much more besides!

Tuning up a washing line in week 12

As you might expect, my favourite challenges were the outdoor ones, and I very much enjoyed building and testing my first home-made HF antenna. I also enjoyed monitoring propagation using IARU beacons and decoding DWD weather broadcasts, two things I didn’t really know about before this year.

Alongside the 52 challenges, my personal ham radio highlights of 2025 have been:

• Winning the RSGB Construction Competition
• The 8-hour salt marsh slog that was the Christchurch rove
• The struggle for phone signal at the POTA 7-fer on the Purbeck Rove
• The return to Win Green where it all began
• The 5-park, 3-person Portland lighthouse rove
• My first overseas activation
• Joining a local club and finally meeting a number of the people I’d spoken to on the air or online, plus the surprise canteen random encounter with Steven M1SDH
• And of course Jamboree on the Air, tuning into the space station and helping the kids talk to a pilot mid-Atlantic.

Testing the 40m dipole I made in week 33

New Year’s Radio Resolutions

Along with whatever the Ham Challenge 2026 weeks turn out to be, my ham radio challenges to myself in 2026 include:

1. My first CW QSO
2. My first QSO via satellite
3. Take part in the RSGB Backpackers contest / 2026 SOTA challenge / do a VHF-only activation
4. Get my POTA Cheetah Rover award with a 15-park rove
5. Up the Christchurch challenge with a 10-park rove on foot (no n-fers)
6. A kite portable POTA activation with M7UTS
7. All parks activated within 20 miles of home (15 left out of 103 by my count)
8. Operate abroad again
9. Work a Field Day with FRARS
10. Jamboree on the Air again, bigger and better

Listening into satellite QSOs in preparation for my first

Stretch goals for 2026 and beyond are:

1. Activate the WCA 19-fer spot in Plymouth
2. A Maritime Mobile park/bunker activation
3. My first meteor scatter QSO
4. Walk the South Downs, Camino de Santiago or South West Coast Path, activating every POTA park on the way

Thanks for following along with my journey to broaden my radio horizons this year, and thanks especially to Fabian DJ5CW for running the challenge. It’s been great running through these challenges in synchrony with others; discussing our wins and our losses together online. I hope to see you all again in 2026 for another round of adventures.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!