The following is a press release from the Amateur Radio Software Award:

The Amateur Radio Software Award (ARSA) committee is proud to announce that the Hamlib project has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Amateur Radio Software Award. This year’s award honors the outstanding work of the current core developers: Nate Bargmann (N0NB), George Baltz (N3GB), Daniele Forsi (IU5HKX), and Mikael Nousiainen (OH3BHX).

The annual ARSA award recognizes software projects that enhance amateur radio and promote innovation, freedom, and openness in amateur radio software development. Hamlib was selected for its long‐standing and essential role in enabling software to interface with transceivers and other controllable devices. For more than a quarter century, Hamlib has provided a unified, reliable way to send control commands and read device status. Despite its age, the project remains actively maintained, with new radios and devices added regularly. Hamlib continues to be the go-to library for both established and emerging amateur radio applications.

About Hamlib

Hamlib provides stable, flexible shared libraries that simplify the development of amateur radio equipment control applications. Many modern transceivers include serial (RS‐232, USB, etc.) or Ethernet/Wi‐Fi/Bluetooth interfaces that allow software‐based control. Hamlib abstracts these interfaces, making it significantly easier for application developers to interact with radios, rotators, amplifiers, and other controllable devices. From WSJT‐X and Fldigi to JS8Call, Log4OM, and CQRlog, today’s widely used amateur radio applications are built on Hamlib.

Nate Bargmann (N0NB) notes that “over the lifetime of the project there have been several principal developers. Its founder is Frank Singleton, VK4FCS. Stéphane Fillod, F8CFE, and until about a year ago Mike Black, W9MDB (SK), were successive principal developers.”

Bargmann reports that the current long‐term support branch will receive the 4.7.1 release in the coming weeks, adding support for new radio models and improving existing ones. Work on Hamlib 5 is also underway. The new major version will introduce some backward‐incompatible changes to isolate internal structures and align with modern best practices, including breaking the C ABI. Discussions are ongoing regarding potential API changes, and feedback from client developers is encouraged.

“There is no set date for a release of Hamlib 5.0.0,” Bargmann adds, “but hopefully within the next year seems possible.”

Learn more about Hamlib at https://hamlib.github.io/.

Special Event Station

To celebrate Hamlib’s selection as the 2026 award recipient—and to encourage nominations for the 2027 Amateur Radio Software Award—the ARSA committee will operate the special event station K7A from November 27 through December 7, 2026.

About the Amateur Radio Software Award

The Amateur Radio Software Award is an annual international award recognizing software projects that enhance amateur radio and promote innovation, freedom, and openness in amateur radio software development.

Award Committee

• Claus Niesen, AE0S (since 2020)
• Kun Lin, N7DMR (since 2020)
• Rich Gordon, K0EB (since 2021)
• Sebastian Delmont, KI2D (since 2026)

For nomination guidelines, event schedules, and information about past winners, visit https://arsaward.com.

Source: Amateur Radio Software Award

Earlier today Linus Torvalds merged a pull request to remove AX.25 and hamradio subsystem support from the Linux kernel. While the headline sounds ominous, most modern AX.25 implementations occur in software at the user level without relying on the kernel level implementation. Direwolf, for example, does not require kernel level AX.25 support. Other software relying on AX.25 may take advantage of dedicated AX.25 Python libraries.

The change comes as a result of AI based bug detection services capable of identifying critical issues among code that may no longer be maintained or utilized by end users. Torvalds stated that the amateur radio related code in the Linux kernel no longer had any active maintainers:

Amateur radio did have occasional users (or so I think) but most users switched to user space implementations since its all super slow stuff. Nobody stepped up to maintain the kernel code.

According to typesense the last Linux kernel commit related to AX.25 was 6 years ago.

Additional code removed includes ISDN support, bus mouse support, and various network drivers including support for old 3Com devices.

Source: Phoronix

In a reel posted to Facebook, Icom has teased a new radio, the X-026 to be revealed at Hamvention 2026. Dubbed as a "concept mock-up," the radio appears to be a mobile rig based on the focus of a vehicle through most of the video. The radio also appears to have a detachable faceplate and support multiple antenna inputs.

From hamlife.jp:

It is a separate machine that separates the main body from the main body and the operation part (display) from the image, and the operation part has four dials around the display (upper, lower and right), and the lower left part is a large size. From its shape, it seems to be a different model from the 144 / 430MHz band D-STAR / FM mobile machine "ID-5200" exhibited at last year's "Ham Fair 2025".

Source: Icom