Our next club meeting will be this Tuesday, March 3rd. John Galvin, N5TIM, will speak about Winlink radio messaging, something that can be pretty challenging. I hope you’ll come on out to learn more.

The contest calendar shows a generous variety of events this weekend, including the North American QSO Party RTTY weekend, and QSO parties for both North and South Carolina.

In news from the world of ham radio:

Spies used to communicate with hidden shortwave transmitters, and one of them has just been dug up in a German forest.

If you’re still having fun with your RTL-SDR dongle, the OpenWebRX radio receiver and server has just been updated, complete with new decoders for digital voice modes.

Another DX-pedition has been postponed due to coronavirus quarntines: the T30ET DX-pedition to Tarawa (West Kiribati) will now happen no sooner than October, 2020.

But on a happy note, new ARISS equipment is scheduled to be launched to the ISS soon, possibly even this coming weekend.

In news from the world of science:

A series of papers outlines the first official findings from the SEIS instrument on NASA’s InSight Mars lander: the first marsquakes have officially been detected. 24 of the detected quakes emitted the type of low-frequency seismic signals that are usually associated with plate tectonics here on Earth.

It seems that we’re not the only ones who depend on the solar cycle; evidence suggests—though it doesn’t yet prove—that solar storms and periods of high solar activity increase the rate at which gray whales are stranded on beaches.

There are some pretty big bada-booms here on earth, but astronomers have found evidence of the biggest boom since the big bang: a bad burp by a bodacious black hole in the constellation of Ophiuchus, the 13th sign of the zodiac.

And if you were hoping to see a supernova this week, it looks like you’re going to be disappointed. It’s been widely reported that Betelgeuse is getting brighter again.