WRTC 2026: The World Championship of Radiosport Comes to East Anglia

On July 8, 2026, fifty teams of two operators each begin arriving in the English counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire for the tenth World Radiosport Team Championship. The comparison to the Olympics gets made so often that it has become a cliche, but the structure actually earns it. A four year cycle. A host nation that changes every time. Years of qualification through real contest results rather than an application essay. And a level playing field so strict that every competitor operates a station they have never seen before, with identical antennas and identical power, on a callsign drawn by lot the same day they learn it.

This is the tenth time it has happened since 1990, and the first time it has happened in Britain.

What WRTC Actually Is

The World Radiosport Team Championship exists to answer a question that ordinary contesting can never quite settle: who is actually the best operator, once you take the station out of the equation. A well funded contester with a hilltop QTH, stacked monobanders, and a legal limit amplifier will beat a skilled operator running a dipole and a hundred watts almost every time, and that has nothing to do with skill. WRTC removes the variable. Every team gets the same antennas, the same power, the same rough patch of ground, and a referee sitting beside them the whole time. What is left is operating ability, band sense, and twenty four hours of nerve.

Getting invited is the hard part. Teams qualify by posting strong scores in major international contests, CQ WW, CQ WPX, ARRL DX, WAE, All Asian, and the IARU HF Championship itself, over a defined qualifying window (October 2023 to March 2025 for this cycle). Scores are weighted by category and compared against the best result from each operator’s home region, then ranked. The people at the top of each region’s list get the call. Most competitors pay their own way to the host country, which is itself a filter, since a WRTC invitation is as much a two year commitment of money and family goodwill as it is an operating achievement.

Once on site, a team draws its station, referee, and callsign at random and then simply operates the IARU HF Championship, the same 24 hour, mixed mode, worldwide contest that thousands of other stations enter every second full weekend of July. WRTC is a competition nested inside a bigger one. For 2026 that means Saturday, July 11, at 12:00 UTC through Sunday, July 12, at 11:59 UTC, on 80, 40, 20, 15, and 10 meters, CW and SSB, exchanging a signal report plus ITU zone (the UK sits in zone 27). Both operators can transmit at once on separate bands, a format called Multi Two that WRTC settled into gradually, first with interleaved single transmission in Russia in 2010, then full simultaneous operation in Massachusetts in 2014, and it has stuck ever since.

Thirty-Six Years in the Making

WRTC began almost by accident. Seattle hosted the Goodwill Games in the summer of 1990, and a group of American contesters built a one time event around it: 22 teams from 15 countries, each pair working from an existing local station with a referee looking over their shoulder. John Dorr, K1AR, and Doug Grant, K1DG, won it. Neither of them could have known they were founding what would become the closest thing amateur radio has to a world championship.

The event found its real form in 1996 in San Francisco, when organizers introduced randomly assigned special event callsigns so nobody could favor a competitor they recognized on the air, a problem that, as it turns out, never fully goes away. Fifty-two teams from 24 countries took part, and Jeff Steinman, then licensed as KR0Y, paired with Dan Street, K1TO, for the first of three consecutive wins, a run that took them through Bled, Slovenia, in 2000 and Helsinki, Finland, in 2002, by which point Steinman was operating as N5TJ. Nobody has matched that three-peat since, and Steinman and Street sat out the next event by choice, a rare case of a dynasty retiring undefeated.

Brazil hosted in 2006, in Florianopolis, and the event grew up considerably: a formal qualification scoring system replaced the earlier, more subjective invitation process, and competitors were given bigger antennas and 700 watt amplifiers to offset the extra distance from the main centers of contest activity in Europe and North America. It also produced the first non-American champions, Canada’s John Sluymer, VE3EJ, and James Roberts, VE7ZO. Russia hosted next, outside Moscow in 2010, organized by the Russian Amateur Radio Union, and brought its own domestic contesting tradition with it: portable Field Day style stations, and for the first time, both operators working simultaneously rather than one at a time. The home team, Vladimir Aksenov, RW1AC, and Alexey Mikhailov, RA1AIP, took the win.

New England hosted in 2014, the largest field to that point at 59 teams from 39 countries, and pushed the format further into true simultaneous two radio operation. Dan Craig, N6MJ, and Chris Hurlbut, KL9A, won it, with Slovakia’s Rastislav Hrnko, OM3BH, and Jozef Lang, OM3GI, taking silver, and Germany edging a strong American team by a single multiplier for bronze. Germany hosted in 2018, in Wittenberg, with Lithuania’s Gediminas Lucinskas, LY9A, and Mindaugas Jukna, LY4L, on top.

The most recent edition is the one worth pausing on. It is officially called WRTC 2022, after the year it was originally scheduled, but the pandemic pushed the actual event back a year, to July 2023 in Bologna, Italy, the same naming quirk the Olympics used for Tokyo 2020. The champions were Yaroslav Oliinyk, UW7LL, and Yuri Onipko, VE3DZ, competing for Ukraine while the full scale Russian invasion was well into its second year. Onipko, a WRTC veteran with seven previous appearances under his belt, and Oliinyk, a promising younger operator, had missed out on a Wild Card invitation and had to crowdfund their own donor team seat to get to Italy at all. They won anyway. It is exactly the kind of story WRTC’s organizers point to when they talk about the event demonstrating goodwill across borders rather than just describing it.

Fair Play Under Pressure

The system is not without friction. Because eligibility depends on a clean record across every qualifying contest, a disqualification anywhere can end a WRTC bid outright, regardless of how strong a team’s other scores are, and that rule has real teeth. Arguments over how consistently it gets enforced go back at least to the 2010 cycle, when operators questioned why the same contest sponsor seemed to judge similar rule violations differently across its own events. More recently, a 2024 CQ WW DX CW disqualification, over a station that transmitted on the same band without the required interlock, cost some highly regarded operators their path to WRTC 2026 and reopened that same argument in contesting circles. For what it is worth, the current CQ WW Contest Director is John Dorr, K1AR, the same operator who won the very first WRTC back in Seattle in 1990. Amateur radio contesting is a small world.

WRTC’s own organizers seem well aware of how much strain two years of chasing a single invitation can put on a competitor’s nerves, and on the people around them. On May 12, 2026, the Judging Committee, whose members include Mark Haynes’ own WRTC 2014 teammate Olof Lundberg, G0CKV, alongside veteran adjudicators Dick Norton, N6AA, Ian Pawson, G0FCT, Trey Garlough, N5KO, Larry Tyree, N6TR, and Rusty Epps, W6OAT, published a public statement on what the contesting world calls cheerleading: friends and clubmates favoring a competitor’s callsign on the air, or spotting them preferentially on the DX clusters, quietly inflating a team’s score without either side ever breaking a rule outright. The statement asked competitors to actively discourage that kind of help from their own supporters, on the reasoning that a result built partly on friendship undercuts the entire point of a level field. A few weeks later, with the event less than three weeks out, organizers issued a further clarification restricting national flags and symbols to the actual contest sites, keeping them out of social events and the awards ceremony on pain of disqualification. It is a small rule with a clear intent: keep this a contest between operators, not a contest between countries.

England’s Turn

The United Kingdom is hosting for the first time in the event’s history, organized by WRTC2026 CIC, a community interest company chaired by Mark Haynes, M0DXR, a rail signalling project manager who competed at WRTC 2014 in Boston. His organizing committee is stacked with people who have done this before: Vice Chairman Lee Volante, G0MTN, refereed at WRTC 2002 in Finland; Fred Handscombe, G4BWP, competed there and refereed at WRTC 2006 in Brazil; Andy Cook, G4PIQ, was a UK team leader in 2002 and 2010; and committee member Philipp Springer, DK6SP, has competed twice, in Germany in 2018 and in Italy in 2023. The Radio Society of Great Britain is the event’s official national partner, sponsoring one of the fifty competitor tents, and RSGB President Bob Beebe, GU4YOX, plans to attend for the event’s full duration.

Headquarters sits at Wyboston Lakes Resort near Bedford, with the fifty operating sites spread through Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire around towns like Thetford, Brandon, Euston, and Ixworth Thorpe. Volunteer crews began the actual mast and antenna builds on the weekend of July 4 and 5, 2026, the first of fifty separate station construction projects that needed to go up in the space of a few days. The event runs July 8 through 13, with the scored contest itself confined to that single 24 hour window on July 11 and 12. Competitors are barred from learning their own assigned callsign until shortly before the start, a secrecy rule that has held since special event callsigns were first introduced, for the same reason.

The commercial backing is substantial for a hobby event: Yaesu came on as Prime Sponsor, with Icom, in both its UK and American divisions, DX Engineering, and Flex Radio among the Gold tier sponsors, Moonraker at Platinum, and close to twenty more companies filling out Silver and Bronze, essentially the entire major manufacturer landscape of the hobby in one sponsor list. Icom alone is donating three IC-7300 MK2 transceivers as prizes, two for the Top Youth Team and one for a general raffle. Organizers expect more than 500 visitors at the HQ venue itself, with thousands more following the World Radio League’s live scoreboard and daily YouTube broadcasts. Four dedicated Youth Teams, for competitors born after July 11, 2000, reflect an explicit priority on pulling new operators into serious contesting rather than just crowning the current best.

Fifty Teams, Including Ours

Of the fifty team slots, 42 are earned the hard way, distributed across 30 qualification areas built around continental balance and recent contest activity, with more competitive regions receiving multiple slots. The remaining places go to the four Youth Team Leaders, a Wild Card invitation or two for outstanding near misses, a deliberately reduced slate of Sponsored Teams whose entry fees help fund the whole operation, and the standing tradition of inviting past champions back.

Central Europe is grouped into one such multi-team area, Qualification Area EU #3, where Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein compete together for four Team Leader positions, one of the more competitive groupings on the board given the depth of German contesting alone. Team 3 in that group is the one worth watching from a Czech perspective: Martin Huml, who will operate under the special contest callsign OL5Y (his everyday callsign is OK1FUA, and he lives in Prague), paired with teammate Vaclav Muska, OK6RA, also of Prague. Huml is not new to WRTC’s orbit. He backed the 2018 event in Germany as a sponsor, supplying guy ropes through his Mastrant brand, so his trip to England closes something of a loop, from behind the scenes supporter to competitor. Muska is an active DXer whose operating credits stretch from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean.

The Czech Republic is not traveling to East Anglia alone. Slovakia’s own entry, OM2VL paired with OM3RM, gives the OK and OM region two seats at the table at once, and regional ham radio press has already flagged it as a strong showing for Central European contesting generally. There is a nice bit of symmetry among the officials as well. Two of the referees walking the East Anglian sites this year, Rastislav Hrnko, OM3BH, and Jozef Lang, OM3GI, are the same pair who won Slovakia’s silver medal at WRTC 2014 in Massachusetts. They will be joined on the referee roster by Tomas, OK2PTZ, from the Czech Republic. A fair number of this year’s officials, in other words, have stood exactly where this year’s competitors are standing now.

Following the Action

None of this requires an HF station of your own to enjoy, though it certainly rewards having one. The full list of fifty special event callsigns goes up on the WRTC 2026 website and social channels on Thursday, July 9, two days before the contest starts. World Radio League is running a live scoreboard at worldradioleague.com/wrtc, and the organizers are producing daily YouTube shows starting July 8 at 16:30 UTC, alongside a full 24 hour livestream of the contest itself with interviews and commentary. Any station, anywhere, can chase the fifty WRTC callsigns during the contest weekend for a certificate: up to 250 possible contacts on SSB and another 250 on CW, ten band and mode combinations across fifty stations, with awards available at a minimum of 50 points.

Fifty teams, drawn from six continents, are about to spend roughly two years of preparation on twenty four hours of radio, most of them paying their own way for the privilege. That is worth watching regardless of which callsigns end up in your log, and this year it is worth a particular look toward Prague, where Martin Huml and Vaclav Muska have earned their seats at a table that does not hand them out easily.

Additional Information

• external_link: https://www.wrtc2026.org

• research_source: WRTC 2026 UK (wrtc2026.org), including the official qualification standings
• research_source: The official WRTC history archive (wrtc.info)
• research_source: Wikipedia, World Radiosport Team Championship entry
• research_source: The Radio Society of Great Britain
• research_source: DX-World.net
• research_source: The ICQ Amateur/Ham Radio Podcast
• research_source: cq.sk

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