The great MOTA Pileup of 2026

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(Bezugnehmend auf des durch einen Unfall (?) erfundenes Format "Milfs on the Air" haben ein LLM und  ich den historischen Pileup, der dies hervorrufen würde als Future History beschrieben)

Excerpt from The Radio Amateur’s Guide to Historical Anomalies

Chapter: The "MOTA" Saturation Event

Published 2126

While often exaggerated in folklore as the night the ionosphere "melted," the reality of the February 14, 2026 event was far more mundane—and far more frustrating. It stands as the single largest instance of "Spectrum Fratricide" in the history of the 80-meter band.

The Setup

The premise was innocent. The Ladies of the Ionosphere wanted to encourage female participation on the HF bands. They chose the acronym MOTA ("Milfs on the Air") as a playful, tongue-in-cheek title to reclaim the slang.

The organizers secured the callsign DL0MOM and chose 3790.0 kHz—the prime "DX window" for intercontinental traffic. They expected a manageable pile-up of perhaps a few hundred well-behaved gentlemen.

They failed to account for the demographic reality of the 80-meter band on Valentine's Day evening: thousands of operators sitting in their shacks, staring at their radios, waiting for anything exciting to happen.

The "White Wall"

At 20:00 UTC, the operator "Helga" asked a simple question: "CQ, CQ, this is DL0MOM calling CQ for Milfs on the Air. Is anybody listening?"

It was a "White Wall" of audio—a solid, roaring block of mid-range frequencies where thousands of callsigns merged into a single, unintelligible 2.5 kHz-wide scream.

The "Split" Catastrophe

Realizing she couldn't decode a single letter through the roar, Helga attempted to implement standard crowd control. She announced:

"Too many stations! I am working Split! Listening 5 up! Listening 5 to 10 up!"

This command, intended to organize the chaos, instead triggered the "Great 80-Meter Sprawl."

In theory, "Split" means the DX station transmits on 3790 kHz, and callers transmit on 3795 kHz (or a range above). In practice, three things happened simultaneously:

  1. The "VFO A" Faction: About 30% of the operators—flustered by the excitement or unfamiliar with their radio menus—didn't engage the Split function. They continued to call Helga on 3790 kHz, effectively jamming her transmission so no one else could hear whom she was calling.

  2. The Frequency Police: Enraged by the "VFO A" faction, the self-appointed "Band Sheriffs" began transmitting on 3790 kHz to yell "UP! UP! SHE SAID UP! YOU LID!" Ironically, the volume of people yelling "UP" became louder than the people making the mistake, rendering the frequency totally useless.

  3. The "creeping" Window: This was the fatal blow. Helga had said "Listening 5 to 10 up" (3795–3800 kHz). But with thousands of operators trying to find a clear spot to be heard, the pile-up didn't stay in that window.

    • When 3800 jammed solid, operators moved to 3802.

    • Then 3805.

    • Then 3810.

Like a gas expanding to fill a vacuum, the desperate callers spread further and further up the band, seeking a quiet frequency where they might be heard.

By 20:15 UTC, the "MOTA" pile-up was no longer a pile-up; it was a Broad-Spectrum Denial of Service Attack.

The wall of callers calling "DL0MOM" had expanded from a 5 kHz slice to cover 3790 kHz to 3850 kHz.

  • The weekly "Bavarian Ragchew Net" on 3840 kHz was overrun.

  • The "SSTV (Slow Scan TV)" frequency on 3730 kHz was inadvertently jam-packed by confused operators tuning the wrong way.

  • The interference became so wide that operators in the CW (Morse Code) portion of the band—300 kHz away—reported hearing "splatter" from over-driven amplifiers shouting "CQ MOTA."

The "Logbook Deadlock"

The event ended not because contacts were made, but because the band became operationally paralyzed.

The final irony came the next morning. DL0MOM had successfully logged only 12 contacts in one hour.

However, over 45,000 operators logged a contact with her, operating on the hopeful logic of: "I yelled my callsign really loud, and she said 'Thank you' to someone, so it was probably me."

When these logs were uploaded to the Logbook of the World (LoTW) servers, the massive discrepancy between the 12 valid QSOs and the 45,000 claimed QSOs triggered a fraud detection algorithm that froze the global verification system for a week.

The IARU subsequently revised its guidelines for Special Event Stations, adding a new clause: "Avoid evocative acronyms that may induce irrational behavior or VFO-management failure in the operator base."