There is a particular kind of moment that hooks people on this hobby for life. For some it is a first contact across the Atlantic. For others it is the day a bit of code they wrote made a radio do something on its own. National Coding Week runs from 14 to 20 September this year, and the RSGB has once again built a set of free amateur radio activities around it. If you have just passed your Foundation exam, or you are still working through the syllabus, this is one of the friendliest on-ramps into the technical side of radio you will find all year.

I know that the word “coding” makes a fair few amateurs reach for the off switch. Stay with me, because the RSGB activities this year are deliberately gentle, cost very little, and they tie straight back to things you already know from your licence training.

What the RSGB has put together for 2026

The RSGB Outreach Team has published a fresh batch of worksheets on the Coding and amateur radio pages, and they are free to download whether or not you are a member. This year’s headline activity uses the BBC micro:bit to send Morse code, either down a length of wire as a telegraph link or wirelessly using the micro:bit’s built-in 2.4 GHz radio. The challenge set is a lovely one: see how far your transmissions will actually travel. That is real propagation work, just at a scale you can carry in a pocket.

Alongside it there is an activity called Ener-G use, which sends data between a pair of micro:bits so you can hear increasing force as a rising pitch. Strap one to a football, or take it on a trampoline, and you have a telemetry link. There is also a short worksheet using the Raspberry Pi Pico 2W, an LED and a resistor to demonstrate Pulse Width Modulation and the idea of duty cycle, programmed through the Arduino IDE rather than Python.

If you have a go at any of them, the RSGB would genuinely like to hear about it. Photos and a short summary go to ncw.coordinator@rsgb.org.uk by 30 September.

Why this matters more than it looks for Foundation holders

Here is the bit I would have appreciated hearing when I was newly licensed. Several concepts that feel abstract in the Foundation syllabus become obvious the moment you build them.

• Duty cycle appears in your EMF exposure calculations. Blinking an LED at varying brightness with PWM turns it from a number in a formula into something you can see.
• Morse timing teaches you why a dot, a dash and the gaps between them have fixed ratios, which makes listening to real CW on 40m far less baffling.
• Sending data between two micro:bits is, in miniature, exactly what every data mode does. Once you have written the sender and the receiver yourself, FT8 and packet stop feeling like magic boxes.
• Measuring how far your micro:bit link reaches across the garden, through a wall, or with the device held high, is antenna and propagation experimenting in its purest form.

None of this requires a transmitting licence, which makes it perfect if you are studying and waiting for your exam date, or if you want to get a family member interested before they commit to the full course.

The kit is cheaper than a decent coax run

A BBC micro:bit costs around £15 to £18, and a Raspberry Pi Pico 2W is roughly £6 or £7. You program the micro:bit in your web browser using the MakeCode editor, so there is nothing to install and no software licence to worry about. Plenty of clubs already have a box of micro:bits sitting in a cupboard from a previous outreach event, so it is always worth asking before you buy.

My honest advice is to pick one worksheet and finish it rather than skimming all of them. The Morse activity is the one I would start with, because it produces something you can immediately demonstrate to another person, and that tends to be what keeps a new interest alive.

A good week to be curious about space, too

The autumn Tonight@8 webinar season has just restarted, and it opened on 7 September with RSGB Board Director Patrick Wood, 2E0IFB, on radio amateurs and the future of satellite communication. He covered FUNcube developments, the Jovian-1 mission and how amateurs are using the geostationary satellite QO-100. If you missed it live, the recordings stay on the RSGB YouTube channel, and they are free to watch. World Space Week follows from 4 to 10 October, so there is a natural thread running from coding week into satellite work.

Worth noting too that the RSGB’s LoRa high-altitude balloon activity from last year is still available on the same coding pages. LoRa is the same long-range, low-power modulation behind the Meshtastic and MeshCore mesh networks that so many UK amateurs have been experimenting with, so a coding week project can lead somewhere surprisingly current.

Amateur radio has always rewarded the people who build and tinker rather than just buy and operate. Writing forty lines of code to make a micro:bit beep out your callsign in Morse is, in spirit, exactly the same thing as winding your own coil or cutting a dipole to length. It is a small act of making something work. Download one worksheet this week, spend an evening on it, and see where it takes you.

73 de M0LGI