1924 — The Contact That Changed Everything
On 18 October 1924, Frank Bell (Z4AA) sat at the radio equipment on his family’s Shag Valley sheep station in East Otago and made contact with 18-year-old Cecil Goyder (2SZ) at Mill Hill School in London — the first two-way amateur radio contact between New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and the first radio transmission of any kind to reach so far. Bell was operating at low power on what is now the 80-metre band. That single contact demonstrated to the world that shortwave could span oceans, and effectively redirected the entire trajectory of long-distance radio. Two years later, on 16 August 1926, the New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters was founded in Auckland. In 2026, NZART turns 100 — marking the centennial with a conference in Auckland from 30 May to 1 June, special ZM prefix and ZL100xx callsigns active all year, and the ZL100 Award running from June through August.
New Zealand’s Global SDR Instrument
A century on, New Zealand is still building the instruments that define the field. The KiwiSDR — designed by John Seamons (ZL4VO/KF6VO) and now in its second generation, manufactured in New Zealand — is one of the most widely deployed open-source HF receivers on the planet. The KiwiSDR 2 covers the entire 10 kHz to 30 MHz spectrum simultaneously, with GPS-disciplined timing, built-in decoders for FT8, WSPR, ALE, HFDL, NAVTEX and more, and TDoA geolocation that lets multiple receivers triangulate the position of unknown HF emitters in real time. More than 700 KiwiSDR units are publicly accessible through kiwisdr.com, and together they form the backbone of distributed HF science — feeding WSPRNet, the Reverse Beacon Network, and PSKReporter, and supplying the HamSCI research network with the southern-hemisphere data it would otherwise have almost none of.
The Southern Hemisphere at SDR 2026
That last point matters more than it might seem. The trans-Tasman propagation corridor — and the paths connecting New Zealand and eastern Australia to Europe, Asia, and the Americas — is a scientifically distinctive window on the ionosphere that the northern hemisphere cannot replicate. WSPR studies of 7 MHz greyline propagation between New Zealand, eastern Australia, and the UK have already produced peer-reviewed results, and the 700-strong KiwiSDR network provides the southern-hemisphere coverage that makes that research possible. The ZL100 Award running through the southern hemisphere winter means NZART members will be active on air across multiple bands right through to the end of August — and the centennial celebrations are still fresh when SDR 2026 opens in Adelaide on 28 September. We are explicitly inviting NZART members, KiwiSDR operators, and ZL researchers to come across the Tasman and be part of the conversation.