On the Air

General Remarks

It’s wonderful that you’re signing up to participate in Polio on the Air in 2025! You may have some questions about what you’re being asked to do (and not asked to do), and that’s what this page is for. If you have a question not answered here, please email nars@narwhal.be and we’ll get right back to you!

  • General Premise
    • Thankfully, unlike 70 years ago, there is no opposition to vaccines anymore; as Salk’s work showed, vaccines are safe, effective, and save millions of lives. Nobody living in our society, built upon the results of scientific progress, would be so out of touch as to believe that vaccines don’t work. We do not, cannot, and see no point in attempting to interact with something that doesn’t exist. Like narwhals, anti-science folks are made up as a story with which to scare children, and we don’t need to engage with unicorns or faeries either.
      • If we hear something that sounds like opposition to vaccines on the air, it’s likely a sign that someone’s radio is mistuned or QRMing. They need to check their antenna and rig connections, ensure their station ground is functional, and possibly debug their radio settings.
    • We are making a statement on this important anniversary: scientific reality exists, and the fact that reality itself is controversial in some groups, like flat Earthers, is their problem; not ours. This isn’t a political statement; it is a premise based upon millenia of scientific advancement, just like ham radio itself. Vaccines have saved uncountable numbers of human lives, and have caused the complete extinction of diseases that used to kill millions of people.
    • We’re not here to engage with people who have no interest in engaging with reality. If people show up to spout rage-filled anti-science nonsense at us, like that UHF bounces off the ionosphere, or that the moon is RF-absorbent, we can simply call the next station; we’re completely uninterested in “convincing” people who don’t want convincing. (Also make a note of their callsign, frequency, and any choice comments for our internal hall of fame!)
    • If people ask for information on vaccines, kindly direct them to https://nars.narwhal.be/polio where we’ll have a few chosen links. Then move on.
  • Dos
    • Show up and do the thing: Please do actually operate on the band(s), mode(s), and time(s) you signed up for. If something comes up and you won’t be able to make a shift you signed up for, please drop a note to nars@narwhal.be so we can pull you off the schedule so that people aren’t looking for you in vain.
    • Call CQ SALK or Polio on the Air: This is how we’re identifying ourselves, in addition to the specific callsigns W7P, W7O, W7L, W7I, and W0O. Some stations will be looking for you, and other stations will learn about our event from hearing that call! (Many of K3QB’s favorite operating events he originally learned about from seeing someone calling CQ <something>, from Parks on the Air to the 13 Colonies.)
    • Send people to our website if asked: https://nars.narwhal.be/polio is the official website for this event, and we’ve even posted it on QRZ for our callsigns for the duration. As the event unfolds, we’ll post new information there, like how many QSOs we’ve logged so far and other standard statistics.
    • Spread joy, performative chaos, excitement, and really wild things:
      • “Commit to the bit.” – house words in one of the NARS households
      • “Life is beautiful and life is stupid. This is, in fact, widely regarded as a universal rule not less inviolable than the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Uncertainty Principle, and No Post on Sundays. As long as you keep that in mind, and never give more weight to one than the other, the history of the galaxy is a simple tune with lyrics flashed on-screen and a helpful, friendly bouncing disco ball of all-annihilating flames to help you follow along.” – Cat Valente, Space Opera.
      • “Existence is finite, joy needs no defense.” – Nathan Pyle, Strange Planet.

During Operation

If you’re operating from somewhere you have Internet access, please hang out in our Slack environment (in the #nars-special-event-stations channel) to swap anecdotes and enjoy each others’ company. Not in our Slack yet? Join the Narwhal Amateur Radio Society, or if you’ve already joined, email nars@narwhal.be to ask to have a Slack invite sent to you.

After Operation (Submit Your Logs!)

We ask that you submit logs from your activation daily, if at all possible. Please email an ADIF-format log to nars@narwhal.be so we can make sure they’re collated and do some light data analysis on them.

Information we are going to need from you in the body of the email, not just in the ADIF:

  • Your name and callsign
  • The callsign you were operating as
  • If you were doing POTA, the POTA entity ID (or IDs) you were operating from
  • Your six-character or better Maidenhead grid square for your location (alternately, a GPS coordinate with three digits after the decimal for both latitude and longitude)

This will let us put together all the information we’ll need to submit the logs to LotW, as well as POTA (if applicable), and to fill out the QSL cards.

Multi-Operation Opportunities

The last days of Polio on the Air overlap with a Parks on the Air Support Your Parks Weekend! We encourage operators to operate from a park at any time (they’re nice!), but we are particularly interested in operators able to operate from a park on (UTC) April 19, 2025.

Sign Up

Sign up to operate as one of our stations! You can pick your times, modes, and bands. Our current 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!