The 52 week ham radio challenge – 2026

A brilliant idea to kick off during the holidays, and then expand your horizons through the year.  Plus we can see some Club activities in our future.

Try this now:  check out The 2026 Ham Challenge at https://www.hamchallenge.org/

The Ham Challenge is a global program of weekly ideas to get you more engaged with the hobby of amateur radio.  It started off from 1 January with a simple but often overlooked challenge:  “Make a QSO on a far-away repeater using Echolink!”.    Do you know how Echolink works?  Have you ever tried?  Aha!  The power of a simple suggestion could be the thing that makes a difference.

How does the Ham Challenge work?

Check out the grid that you’ll find on the HamChallenge website.   They’ve only exposed the first three months of challenges, and you’ll see that some will be a doddle and some will… challenge.

That’s the point.

In the Challenge grid, there’s a twiddle mark > next to each weekly challenge.  Click the twiddle to get more info on the Challenge, including hints, tips and links.

On the left side of the grid each Challenge is graded as easy/medium/stretching, and has a type icon representing IT skill, radio comms, fun, people, and general tech.   On the right side of the grid you can see related “toots”, which are short posts made through one of the Mastodon servers.   Don’t know about Mastodon?   There’s another learning area and skill that you can explore as part of the journey.  You don’t need a userid, signon, or anything else;  just click through the hyperlinks and see what others are doing and saying.

You get points for each challenge completed and there’s a leaderboard.  Of course it’s all non-competitive in the spirit of being Hams, but… well, just like Worked-All, Field Days, distance records and all other manner of go-for-it exercises, you can certainly build up bragging rights.

Why not have a go, and let’s compare notes at the February meeting.  By then you might have conquered Echolink, a new mode, talked about antennas, crossed the world on zero power, used HAMNET and proved that you can whistle.  🙂

Let us know how you go.  Drop a line to to keep us posted, and if you’d like some help send a note to and we’ll see what we can do.