Re: [stxares] Please let us know about any up coming events for the Website

This is from the NTS Letter September 1, 2026:

Obsidian Wave 1 Reminder, September 19, 2026

On April 28, 2025, Spain and Portugal experienced an electrical outage that severely impacted electrical power generation, internet, and commercial communications for 10 hours. Here in the United States, several teams of amateur radio operators have been exploring options for successfully using HF to provide emergency communications in the event of an incident of this class or larger for whatever reason (EMP, Carrington event, cyber-attack or grid instability).

The National Traffic System 2.0 (NTS2) Digital Committee is preparing to hold a country-wide exercise on Saturday, September 19, between 0900 PT/1200 ET and 1300 PT/1600 ET. The testing will exercise the following four components:

  1. an HF activation activity

  2. country-wide transmission of a command message

  3. submittal of status messages by participating stations

  4. transmission of health and welfare messages following the “I Am Safe” protocols of RRI using the Digital Traffic Net/National Traffic System.

We have established a mailing group to support this event, which can be found at: groups.io/g/obsidian-wave. If you would like to participate, we encourage you to join the mailing group and participate in training, which will be announced to the mailing group. Taking part in the training is encouraged because the event is relatively complex.

We look forward to your participation in this exercise, as well as follow-on exercises.

NTS2 Digital Team: nts2.arrl.org/working-groups/digital-networks

Web site on NTS2 effort: nts2.arrl.org

This is a joint activity of ARRL and RRI (Radio Relay International).