I'm joined by Mark Haynes MØDXR and Lee Volante GØMTN of the WRTC 2026 Committee, and James Cribbs NØWRL, founder and CEO of the World Radio League. Together, they’re developing a new spectator-facing experience for the World Radiosport Team Championship. WRTC 2026 in the UK won’t just be a contest—it’s set to offer a more immersive way to follow the action. Cribbs and the WRL team are building a custom real-time QSO tracking and analytics system designed to echo the clarity and drama of eSports coverage. What began as a conversation at Dayton has become a ground-up rethinking of how the wider world can watch and engage with radio sport. For competitors, that means non-intrusive Raspberry Pi loggers feeding live data without touching their main setups. For the audience, it means live scoreboards, propagation maps, and real-time band-change alerts. But new tools bring new questions. Concerns around privacy, spotting parity, and potential cheerleading were raised—particularly by seasoned contesters. Volante confirmed referees will be ready with safeguards, including cutting all spotting if a station loses connection. And while team identities will remain masked, the increased transparency marks a shift in how WRTC unfolds in public view. The system’s first test—during IARU 2025—was promising. Next up: a full trial during CQWW Phone from the M6T superstation. For WRL, WRTC is more than just a technical challenge; Cribbs sees it as the platform’s coming-of-age—moving from a beginner-friendly tool to a robust, contest-grade infrastructure. And as Haynes made clear, the long-term goal is bigger than any one event: it’s about legacy, youth outreach, and strengthening the future of amateur radio. Join the conversation and subscribe to Q5 Worldwide Ham Radio.
Should format this like they do with the Counterstrike gaming community. I never played but my son and I would watch matches streamed live, with commentators that would narrate the matches, strategies, and effectiveness.
Hi, I hope that WRL team will add specifically for this event a new function which will seriously improve call sign recognizing by implementation some signal batch. Decoding of this batch will allow to watch a call sign for any HF bands. Maybe this is some phantastic idea, but this is really great function that everyone HAM want to use. Thanks for all WRL team and have good success. 73, KD9WIF
Competitive sports and a lot of contests with three radios on two ears and endless computing are part and result of instinctive life, the fight for hierarchy. As such, they are endlessly boring and uninteresting—a corrupted form of the noble intellectual activities and pursuits of ham radio. (This differs sharply from physical activities or games performed for one's own benefit.) Even listening to them is torture; sports, sports, sports... A little competition can be good, but it's not the main focus. Fortunately, I find that most young people are smarter than that when asked what interests them about amateur radio and they don't even consider it a sport. Also, the bloody, violent, brutal, filthy, subhuman trash like the vast majority of so-called games (and the entertainment industry in general, the biggest enemy of the human mind) should be completely avoided, young people or not.
Why does anyone need this. Just enjoy radio as a technical hobby without trying to make it competitive....just want to ensure that the voice of the significant portion of operators is heard.
WRTC is a "contest within a contest", and a long-established contest at that. Nobody is going to be forced to engage with any aspect of it that they don't want to. I think these attempts to open contesting up to a wider audience are well worth doing.
