A Great After-Holiday Gift … ARRL Kids Day!
Twice a year, ARRL offers an event designed to promote amateur radio to our youth … Kids Day! Kids Day number one takes place on the first Saturday of the year and for 2026, that’s January 3. The event runs from 1800 UTC through 2359 UTC. You can operate as much or as little as you like. It’s all designed to give on-the-air experience to young people and hopefully foster interest in getting licenses of their own. It is also intended to give older hams a chance to share their station and love for amateur radio with their children.
Here’s how it works: You can invite your kids or grandkids to your station, explain how it works, and then take turns talking on the radio. You could also share the excitement with your neighbors, a Scout troop, a church group, or the general public at a library or a shopping mall.
You can use most any frequency from 10 – 80 meters. You can also use one of your favorite repeaters… with permission from the repeater’s owners. Be sure to observe third-party restrictions when making DX QSOs. Then the real fun starts…take pictures, write your story, and send them to ARRL. With a signed release form, your story can appear in ARRL publications like QST, as part of the Kids Day and Youth write-ups, Strays, Up Front, and more. Send stories to contests@arrl.org.
Then, the part that will light up the kids’ eyes even more…a Kids Day Certificate of Participation (PDF). It’s downloadable, and every kid who has participated gets to take one home to hang on their wall!
Signup is easy at Kids Day on the ARRL website. You’ll get all of the information you’ll need to make this after-holiday gift a yearly event! And remember….there is another ARRL Kids Day on the third Saturday in June!