Mark your calendars now. This year’s second ARRL EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) Contest weekend is September 5 – 6, 2026, 0000 UTC on Saturday through 2359 UTC Sunday, and encompasses the bands 2.3 GHz and up.
The contest objective is to work as many amateur stations as possible via the EME path on the bands associated with the above weekend dates.
“Our goal is scoring – while grid squares are shown in the contest log upload for every QSO reported,” said ARRL Radiosport and Field Services Manager Bart Jahnke, W9JJ.
“What is transmitted over the air to complete the QSO may simply be your 4-digit grid square, OR a report in any mutually understood format if station size or propagation prohibit grid squares from being exchanged (e.g., these typical exchanges have included, T/M/O {weak-signal CW}, RST {CW or voice}, or -R## {digital}). Then, when submitting your log to ARRL, you would enter your 4-digit-grid-square and the 4-digit-grid-square of the station you contacted,” added Jahnke.
Beginning this fall, with all ARRL contests after September VHF, and for the future, all EME contest logs must be uploaded to the dedicated EME Electronic Submission page. For those with electronic spreadsheets or paper logs, a utility for converting log files in non-Cabrillo format to Cabrillo is available at www.b4h.net/cabforms.
Rules for the next two EME weekends, 3 and 4 … 50 to 1296 MHz, October 31 – November 1, and November 28 – 29, are posted at www.arrl.org/eme-contest.
As a “prequel” to the September ARRL EME Contest, you can enjoy an almost blood moon lunar eclipse. On August 27 – 28, 2026, a very deep partial lunar eclipse will be visible from Europe, Africa, North America, and South America, with just over 96% of the moon passing into Earth’s shadow. That event will turn the moon into shade of crimson in light filtered and refracted by Earth’s atmosphere.