By Bob Griffin (KC2JJM)

SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Every ham's logbook tells the same story in expanding circles. Across town on 2 meters. Across the country on 20. Across an ocean on a gray-line opening. Moonbounce, if you're stubborn enough. Each ring is the same discipline -- weak signals, patience, knowing your noise floor -- applied to a longer path.

This is a story about chasing the outermost ring.

SIXTY-FIVE YEARS OF A DEAD BAND

First, the puzzle that drives the whole field. The Fermi paradox, in one line: a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, most of them billions of years older than the Sun, should be full of civilizations -- so where is everybody? Enrico Fermi asked it over lunch in 1950, and it has not been answered since.

Since 1960, SETI has worked one way: point a big dish at a star and scan for a carrier near 1420 MHz, the hydrogen line -- the natural calling frequency any radio-literate civilization could find. Project Ozma did it with one channel. SETI@home did it with millions of our PCs (I had that screensaver running in the shack for years; many of you did too). Breakthrough Listen does it today with billions of channels. Sixty-five years of better receivers have returned exactly one thing: silence. No confirmed carrier, ever.

Every ham knows what a dead band usually means. A band that sounds empty on a carrier scan can be carrying dozens of QSOs at 20 dB below the noise -- you hear nothing because you're listening for the wrong mode, not because nobody's on the air. FT8 taught a whole generation of operators that lesson.

So here's the question my project asks: what if the silence is a design feature? In the paper, we develop a new testable hypothesis, called Behavioral SETI, to explain the apparent radio silence.

THINKING LIKE THE SYSTEM DESIGNER

Suppose an advanced civilization wanted to reach emerging societies across the galaxy, over spans of millions of years. Design that system the way an engineer would and three decisions fall out. Build no transmitter -- stars already radiate more power than any machine ever could; the cheap way to signal is to modulate sources already on the air. Write in ratios -- a sender who shares no units with you can only use dimensionless relationships among measurements; the message isn't on any one channel, it's in how observables move together. Spend nothing on receivers who can't act -- gate the message behind a proof of capability.

If that's the design, nobody hears it with a carrier scan. You find it by looking for behavior in sources that already exist -- which means searching astrophysics archives, not the airwaves.

THE CRYPTOLOGICAL GATE

The strangest rule is the third one, and it deserves its own explanation. The framework predicts the message arrives locked: a short pointer tells you where to look, but the payload behind it is protected by what a cryptographer calls proof of work -- a puzzle that is cheap to set, expensive to solve, and trivial to verify once solved. Why would anyone bother, across interstellar distances? Three reasons an engineer would insist on it.

First, the gate is a license exam that grades itself. A sender cannot proctor anything from thirty light-years away. Solving the puzzle certifies the receiver's capability with no effort from the sender: if you opened it, you had the computers; if you had the computers, you have the industry and the science to act on what's inside. Nobody unqualified can even read the question.

Second, it sets the timing automatically. Our own computing grew eight-billion-fold in one working lifetime -- Cray-1 to Frontier, 1976 to 2022. A gate pitched at industrial-scale computing opens within a generation of a civilization first noticing it. The lock is a fuse, timed by the receiver's own growth -- no schedule, no appointments, nothing that can go stale over a million years.

Third, the unlock is authentication. When the receiver transmits the solved key back, that transmission proves the work was actually done -- no spoofing, no accidental triggers, no energy wasted answering noise. In ham terms: the gate is the ultimate CTCSS. Except this tone can't be looked up in a manual. It can only be earned.

WEAK-SIGNAL DISCIPLINE, APPLIED TO ARCHIVES

So that's what I did: 49 searches across public archives -- GOES X-ray satellites, neutron monitors, pulsar timing arrays, Voyager's magnetometers, solar neutrino detectors. And here's the part I'd defend at any club meeting: the methods are ham methods. Long integration to pull signals out of noise. Measuring the noise floor before claiming anything sits above it. And never trusting the rig without a test signal -- every detection limit is verified by injecting synthetic signals and confirming the pipeline recovers them. The whole campaign's positive control was recovering the Sun's known five-minute oscillations from satellite data -- the WWV of the project. If your system can't hear the known signal, your silence means nothing.

The score: 45 nulls with measured limits, and no contact. In this business a calibrated null is the product.

THE EMAIL TO JAPAN

My favorite result wasn't in any dataset. One channel needed solar-neutrino data from Super-Kamiokande, the great detector in a mine in Japan. The public link had been dead for years. So I wrote to the collaboration -- callsign in the signature, one ham asking about data. The spokesperson answered the next day, pointed me to a public 22-year dataset better than the one I'd asked about, and committed to fixing the dead link. We ran the search within 48 hours. Null, with limits -- and the first time anyone had asked that dataset an aperiodic question. QSL received, you might say.

HOW FAR DO OUR SIGNALS GET?

A 2025 SETI Institute study ran the honest numbers on Earth's own detectability, and hams will appreciate the EIRP ladder: Arecibo's planetary radar, at 20 terawatts EIRP, would stand out at 12,000 light-years. The Deep Space Network: 65. The combined mobile-phone leakage of the entire planet: 4. The loudest thing humanity ever put on the air was pinging asteroids. Everything we broadcast to each other barely leaves the neighborhood -- one more reason silence proves so little.

And one thought I can't shake, as an AM DX'er myself: the earliest thing any radio civilization transmits is its lowest bands. A designed listening post watching for emerging civilizations wouldn't need to decode a 1930s 500 kW AM flamethrower like WLW -- just detect the carrier, coherently integrated, far below any demodulator's threshold. Carrier detection at absurd SNR is a very ham idea. The paper takes it seriously.

GOING DEEPER

The write-up, a six-minute animated version, and the full paper with every method and limit are here:

https://dxtra.com/static/galactic-dx/summary.html?src=hamdaily

Source: KC2JJM

The following is a press release from KH6ML:

HONOLULU, HAWAII — September 16, 2026 — What began as an early-morning Parks on the Air and Summits on the Air activation at one of Hawaii's most recognizable landmarks unexpectedly turned into an opportunity for an amateur radio operator to put years of emergency preparedness and communications training to practical use.

A short video documenting the Diamond Head activation and emergency response is available here: https://youtu.be/_GO4as2CSvc

Michael Miller, KH6ML, began hiking the Diamond Head Summit Trail on Oahu at approximately 7:15 a.m. Wednesday morning. His plan was to complete a combined POTA and SOTA activation before heading to his full-time job as a partner at Tiki's Grill & Bar in Waikiki.

Operating portable from the summit with an FX-4CR HF transceiver at approximately 20 watts, a small Bioenno battery, end-fed wire antenna and an AnyTone VHF/UHF handheld, Miller completed 11 contacts.

His activation included Diamond Head State Preserve, POTA US-6425; Diamond Head Summit State Trail, US-10913; and the Diamond Head SOTA summit, KH6/OH-025.

Moments after completing his 11th contact, a visitor approached Miller and asked if he could help. A woman had collapsed inside the observation bunker below the summit.

Miller immediately left his HF station behind, took his handheld radio and headed toward the patient while calling 911. Because of uncertainty about cellular coverage inside the reinforced structure, Miller also advised amateur radio operators with whom he had been communicating to stand by in case an alternate communications path became necessary.

The patient, a visitor from Japan, was traveling with her husband and adult daughter. Miller began gathering information from the family and relaying it to emergency dispatchers while Honolulu Fire Department personnel responded.

"The 911 dispatchers were extremely professional," Miller said. "They were calm, direct and focused on getting the information the responding crews needed. The communication between dispatch and the field response was impressive."

Honolulu Fire Department personnel reached the bunker and assumed care of the patient. Additional firefighters and rescue personnel followed with medical and rescue equipment. The difficult location required responders to develop a plan for moving the patient from the confined bunker and across the steep summit terrain.

A helicopter was subsequently brought into the response.

"The professionalism of the firefighters was remarkable," Miller said. "They climbed Diamond Head carrying their equipment, immediately assessed the situation and went to work.

Miller later accompanied the patient's daughter down the trail and helped her reconnect with her family and emergency personnel at the base of Diamond Head.

Later that afternoon, Miller received a message from the family thanking him for his assistance and reporting that the woman was doing well and the family had returned to their hotel.

For Miller, the incident also demonstrated how the skills developed through amateur radio can complement broader emergency-preparedness training.

"Did ham radio help? I think it was one piece of the puzzle," Miller said. "Amateur radio teaches us to communicate clearly, know our location, pass information accurately and think about what happens when normal communications aren't available. Add CERT training, Red Cross training, Scouting and other life experiences, and hopefully you're a little better prepared when somebody needs help."

Miller serves as a Deputy Coordinator for Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES) for the City and County of Honolulu. He is also an Assistant Section Manager and Government Liaison for the ARRL Hawaii Section. Outside amateur radio and emergency communications, Miller is a partner at Tiki's Grill & Bar in Waikiki.

The incident was a reminder that while POTA and SOTA provide amateur radio operators with opportunities to practice portable operations, antennas, low-power communications and field deployment, those same habits of preparedness can have applications far beyond making contacts.

"I went up Diamond Head looking for radio contacts," Miller said. "The most important contact I made that morning wasn't on the radio."

73 from KH6ML

Source: KH6ML

By Rob Rosenberger (K4HST)

Do this: visit the FCC call sign lookup and search for W0QUF. It says right there on the page: "Status: Active." Except it's not. Look farther right and you'll see its grace period started in January. Now search for it at the ARRL call sign lookup. They give you no hint it's in a grace period.

Do an FCC lookup on KD0NZJ. It's long expired, right? Except it's not. Look to the left and you'll see a "PA" icon, which means it remains active pursuant to FCC rule 1.62. If you look it up on ARRL, it'll say "(Administrative Update Applied)" below the expiration date. They give you no hint you can lawfully communicate with them.

Neither FCC nor ARRL offer visual cues on their search pages when you look up a call sign. You must inspect the data with your calibrated eyeballs to confirm its status.

So, let's go over what you need to know. We'll break it down into five categories:

A "live" call sign is marked active and can transmit. It has not reached its expiration date. Roughly 90% of all "active" call signs fall into this category.

A "dagger" call sign is marked active and can transmit regardless its expiration date. A "pending application" extends its life. Roughly 430 call signs fall into this category (a scant 0.05%) and the FCC often spends years resolving them.

A "grace" call sign is marked active yet cannot transmit. It exceeded its expiration date, lies within its two-year grace period, and has no pending application. Roughly 10% of all "active" call signs fall into this category.

A "zombie" call sign is marked active yet cannot transmit. It exceeded its grace period with no pending application, yet the ULS database failed to mark it expired. The most recent example is KI4FHE. (If you run an FCC lookup, do not have any liquids in your mouth! You've been warned.) Zombies might pop up for a day or two if the second anniversary of their expiration date falls on a holiday Monday.

A "dead" call sign is marked canceled, expired, or terminated. Enough said.

You might ask "where did these five terms come from?" The short answer: The interwebs apparently had no terms for them and I needed a taxonomy for the niche PDF amateur radio call books I produce. My searches of online amateur radio literature, developer repositories, and the FCC's ULS documentation revealed no similar published model ... so I offer this to the public domain:

Ta da! You now understand what "active" means when you look up a call sign on a search page. Calibrate your eyeballs for the FCC, shame the ARRL webmaster for me, and 73!

Source: Rob Rosenberger (K4HST)