It’s the last weekend before Field Day! Are you ready? If you still need some hints, please check out the the “DARC Field Day 2020 Participation How We Can Have Fun” document that your fellow club members have been working on.

If your looking for some on-air fun to help you finish your Field Day preparations, there are a few events on the calendar. The West Virginia QSO Party gives you a chance to pick up a sometimes-difficult state, while the All-Asia DX Contest will let you try for a long, long-range contact or two. It’s not hard to reach Venezuela from the Dallas area, so you might want to check out The Battle of Carabobo International Contest, and if you love a noisy challenge on 160 meters this is one of the Stew Perry Top Band Challenge weekends.

In news from the world of amateur radio:

The ARRL reports that west-coast station K6KPH will not be able to re-transmist ARRL bulletins on Field Day, due to a National Park shutdown. All stations will need to monitor W1AW. Hopefully, the ARRL will get their schedule updated.

If you’d like to hear some insults in Russian, the ARRL has also passed along the news that a Russian-Ukranian war of “hate rap” and ugly symbols in waterfall displays is continuing in the 40-meter band.

In news from the world of science:

Two new pesticides, Sivanto and Transform, developed to have fewer effects on bees still kill them or cause a reduced lifespan, according to a new study.

Machine learning helped pick thousands of tiny earthquakes out of the noise, and revealed that underground water movement was causing earthquake swarms in California.

There seems to be a rule in astronomy that really important work should, whenever possible, also be really beautiful…and this new X-ray map of the sky is no exception. The eROSITA X-ray telescope has finished a new map of the entire X-ray sky; it’s stunning, and it shows 10 times more X-ray sources than the best previous map.