Daily Archives: July 14, 2026

The UK was host to the World Radiosport Team Championship for 2026 where 50 international radio amateur contest teams competed last weekend, physically from field-day sites across Suffok and Norfolk.  They all have identical kit and 24 hours to compete. Inspired by a visit to the RSGB team at the Championship headquarters at Wyboston Lakes in Bedfordshire I decided to try to work a few of the stations from my location in North Bedfordshire, as G4ABQ.  I monitored all the HF bands using my nRSP-ST with G5RV antenna. I simply used Safari on an iPhone to connect to my nRSP-ST’s webserver (  http://nrsp.ddns.net:9001/ ) to tune around for the special WRTC callsigns.  Being approximately 50-100 miles from the stations, it’s a tricky distance for all but 80m and 40m and even then not all the time. I had a sneak look around 3,30am local time and heard an SSB WRTC station on 40m, so got up and fired up the  ICOM 718  and got stuck in.

Looking for the WRTC stations via my nRSP-ST

I discovered the significance of my casual participation. Amazingly in little more than an hour, I had a run of mostly 80m SSB contacts—yet four of those contacts landed squarely in the logs of the provisional Top 5 teams. Because low-band domestic multipliers carry extra multiplier points, it feels like we were able to make a real impact! Among the nine  stations worked were the eventual 3rd-place finishers (MB1I), 4th-place powerhouse (MB4G), and the reigning grand champions (MB2M), who clinched 1st place on a razor-thin margin. While the SDRplay station was operating purely for the fun of participating in a historic ham radio weekend, the final leaderboards show that even a relatively easy-to-do QSO can help nudge the world’s best over the finish line!

The championship callsigns were all of the format MB followed by a single number and a single letter,  so they were very distinctive. Thanks to realtime networking of log data to the championship HQ, due to the efforts of James Cribbs N0WRL who is the founder and CEO of World Radio League ,anyone who worked one of the teams can get a summary simply by entering their callsign on the World Radio League page.  Here was my summary (with the MB2M winners highlighted):

G4ABQ summary of WRTC 2026 station QSOs

People have commented how difficut it was to relate callsign to actual teams. This may be deliberate, but I eventually found a link which shows the mapping of operators to callsigns. Click here

Mapping of teams to callsigns

For more about the nRSP-ST networked SDR, go to: https://www.sdrplay.com/nrspst/

For more about SDRconnect’s unique stable WebSocket API, go to https://www.sdrplay.com/sdrconnect-module-system-and-examples/

More about WRTC: https://www.wrtc2026.org/