My wife's uncle Kazuo is 79. Home is a fishing town on the Miyagi coast. He has been a ham radio operator since 1965. Every Saturday at 9 p.m., he goes into the little room behind his kitchen, turns on a radio older than me, and talks to a man in Kansas. His name is Orval. He's 84. Retired TV repairman. They have been talking every Saturday night for 38 years. They have never met. In 1988, they mailed each other the postcards ham operators trade to prove a contact happened. Kazuo's is still taped above the radio. A red barn. A cow in front of it. On the back, in blue pen: "Good signal. Come back anytime. — Orval. (The cow is Buttercup.)" He has come back 1,900 times. Neither of them speaks the other's language well. They talk about weather, grandkids, baseball, and their knees. Mostly their knees. They have been comparing knee doctors since 2015. Every week, at about 9:20 (which is 6:20 a.m. in Kansas), you can hear Orval's wife, Phyllis, yell from somewhere in the house: "ORVAL. BREAKFAST." Every week, Orval says, "Comin', Phyl." Kazuo learned "Comin', Phyl" before he learned "Nice to meet you." He says it to his own wife now. She has no idea who Phyl is. She no longer asks. For 23 years, Orval knew exactly one word of Japanese. "Sushi." He used it as a greeting. Every call ends the same way. The way hams have signed off for a hundred years. With a number. "73." It means best regards. In March 2011, the tsunami hit Kazuo's town. The phones died. The power died. His house was gone. Nobody in Kansas knew if he was alive. So Orval sat down at his radio and started calling. For three days. Day and night. Every frequency he could reach. Before he started, he called a Japanese restaurant in Wichita and asked the owner one question: how do you say "Are you okay?" So for three days, a 69-year-old man in Kansas called into the dark, in the worst Japanese accent in the Midwest: "JA7, this is W0. Kazuo. Daijoubu? Kazuo. Daijoubu?" Phyllis brought his meals to the radio room. Other hams across America heard him and started calling too. Kentucky. Oregon. A retired Navy man in Florida. Strangers, passing the same call across a whole country, out over the Pacific, all night. On day four, Kazuo carried his radio up the hill behind the school where everyone was sheltering, hooked it to a car battery, and turned it on. The first voice he heard from outside his town since the wave was a Kansas accent, saying his name. "Kazuo. Daijoubu?" He answered in English and Japanese at the same time. "Orval. Daijoubu. I'm okay." Phyllis says Orval set the microphone down, put his head on the desk, and cried. Then he lifted it again and said, "Good signal, partner. Real good." This spring, it was Kazuo's turn. Two Saturdays in a row, Kansas didn't answer. So Kazuo, 79, sat down at his radio and did exactly what Orval had done. Every night. "W0, this is JA7. Orval, are you there?" A ham operator in Topeka heard him. A young man. He'd never met either of them. The next morning, he made the two-hour drive to Orval's farmhouse. Orval had had a stroke. Hospital bed. No words yet. For six weeks, the young man got on his radio every Saturday at 9 p.m. Japan time and passed messages between the hospital and Miyagi. He would not tell Kazuo his name. He said it wasn't important. He told him only one thing. The radio he was using had been his grandfather's. In March 2011, his grandfather had been on the air too. One of the voices calling all night. Last Saturday, right at nine, a voice came through. Slow. Every word took work. "JA7. This is W0." A long pause. "Kazuo. Daijoubu?" Kazuo says he couldn't answer for almost a minute. "Daijoubu, Orval. Daijoubu." They talked for twenty minutes. Mostly about their knees. Then Orval signed off. But this time, instead of "73," he said a different number. "88." Kazuo didn't know that one. He checked his old handbook. In ham radio, 88 means love and kisses. He sent it back. Then he got up, found his wife in the kitchen, and said it to her. In English. She doesn't know what the number means. She's decided she likes it. America, you have men in back rooms all over your country who will call into the dark for three days, in terrible Japanese, to find one friend. And then they teach their grandsons how. Please keep your radios on. 73.

During their first day on-orbit, the @framonauts got to work on their research activities, including a study on how human cognition adapts to the spaceflight environment within the first few hours of reaching space. Amateur Ham radio enthusiasts in Berlin and across Europe communicated with @rprogge as part of Fram2Ham. The crew also completed the first initial @Starlink tests on-orbit!

The crew will become the first humans to view the Earth’s polar regions from space, participate in a Ham Radio contest, and record the sounds of Dragon, among other activities

Nobody wants to be more wrong about what’s coming in the United States than I do. Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Be prepared. If you are convinced you need to buy a firearm, by all means, get trained by an NRA certified firearms instructor. Then practice, practice, practice. Ammunition for practicing can get expensive, while live-round range practice is an absolute necessity; it can be supplemented by dry-fire practice. I recommend the Strikeman Dry-Fire Laser Firearm Training System which allows you to train without the expense of live ammunition. It’s actually awesome! Join your local ham radio club and go to ‘in person’ meetings. The folks you meet there will be a source of invaluable information. Get your ham operators license, it’s not hard. Also, I’ll bet you can get a decent handheld ham radio with all the accessories for $10-$20 if not free. You may want to get a satellite phone. For about $90-$120 a month, you get service and a satellite phone included. Again, before buying a ham radio, speak to the experts at your local ham radio club/group. You should also consider taking a CPR and an advanced Red Cross first aid class, along with civil defense training, and becoming an emergency civil defense volunteer. Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, I earn a very small commission from qualifying purchases.