What

In celebration of the 70th anniversary of the April 12, 1955 US approval of the Salk polio vaccine, NARS is delighted to be running the Polio On The Air event from April 5 - 19, 2025! (To avoid confusion with our friends at Parks on the Air, we will be calling CQ SALK on all fashionable protocols.)

Why

Polio was bad and vaccines are good. We realized that some people have forgotten that vaccine-preventable illnesses are bad, so we wanted to help spread the good news, in keeping with our charter: “…to foster joy, goodwill, understanding, and experiential enlightenment of all people….”

Also, QSL cards are great!

Participate

Sign up to operate as one of our stations! You can pick your times, modes, and bands. Our schedule is on Google Sheets and you can sign up for times by emailing nars@narwhal.be with your requested times, modes, bands, and your callsign. We’ll get in touch with what you need to know and how to submit your logs, and we’ll put you on the schedule!

How

We will be operating the Special Event Stations W7P, W7O, W7L, W7I, and W0O throughout the period. Make contact with one, get a QSL card. Make contact with all five, get five QSL cards—and something really neat happens if you collect all five!

In order to ensure that our friends with no HF station, location, time, or privileges can participate, we are going to be operating on many different modes. You can get all the contacts on one mode/band or many!

HF Digital

  • FT8: look for our stations calling CQ SALK on FT8 and FT4. PSKReporter is your friend! We also love HamAlert if you want to get push notifications to your phone (or whatever) when a particular station comes online.

HF Voice

  • SSB: We’ll have SSB voice stations on different bands throughout the operating period, calling “CQ SALK” and “Polio on the Air” and generally spreading the good word that vaccines are safe, effective, and have saved billions of lives.

VHF/UHF Voice

  • EchoLink/AllStar: We are planning a way to do this with VHF+-only privileges via EchoLink, AllStar, and perhaps assistance from our friends at Pride Radio Group. Details to come!

QSL Policy

We will send you a QSL card to your address as listed in HamQTH! (We don’t use QRZ; if you still think it’s cool to be “Master of Africa” in 2025, Cecil Rhodes would love to meet you. When we tried to point this issue–and the issue of paid QRZ members sending right-wing screeds—out to the QRZ membership, they banned our membership from their site and took our club call with them. We prefer to let the sort of people who think endorsing racism is A-OK hang out together, enjoying a refreshing swim, far from the rest of us.)

Donations

If you care to donate to cover the cost of your QSL cards, we would love that. Please send your donations to the information below.

TODO (still picking, check back later)