Bunkerfest 2026

The WWBOTA International Bunkerfest ran from 24 July to 26 July 2026 and what a weekend it was! 

Why We Do This

It’s worth pausing, before we look at the numbers, to remember what all of this is actually for. Every one of the bunkers activated and hunted over the long weekend is a physical remnant of a moment in history — a WW1 dugout or command post, a coastal battery, a Cold War command post, an anti-aircraft emplacement, a civil defence shelter. Structures built in fear, in defiance, or in preparation for conflicts that shaped the countries we now call home. Many are crumbling, some are barely accessible, and plenty would be entirely forgotten if nobody ever stood beside them with a radio and a reason to be there.

That’s the quiet purpose behind all of this. Every activation is, in a small way, an act of remembrance — a moment where someone stops, reads the history of a place most people drive straight past, and connects it, through the ether, to hunters and fellow activators scattered right across the continent and beyond. The QSOs are the mechanism. The history is the point.

It’s also why WWBOTA has never been about league tables or leaderboards, and never will be. We don’t rank activators against each other, and we’re not really interested in who’s “winning.” What we’re interested in is the shared endeavour of it all — the sense that everyone, from the newest activator finding their first local bunker to the old hand chasing contacts across continents, is part of the same story. It’s less a race, more a gathering. And the small, deliberate choices behind how WWBOTA works — the pace of it, the pairing of international reach with proper national roots, the invitation to actually know something about the place you’re standing in — are all in service of that. Not just a reference number to tick off, but a little piece of history, met properly, one bunker at a time.

The Numbers

So, now looking at the numbers …

Over the weekend, activators logged 11,053 QSOs across 315 activations, at 281 unique bunkers, worked by 86 unique activators in 19 DXCC entities, this compares favourably with our 2025 Bunkerfest (which was a two day event) of 170 bunkers activated (average 85 per day) and 70 unique activators. 

The average HF activation logged 38 QSOs — comfortably clear of the 25-QSO bar — and over 90% of HF activations included at least one bunker-to-bunker contact, averaging 5.2 B2B QSOs each. 

Saturday was the peak: 139 activations and 4,808 QSOs in a single day, with Friday (89 activations, 2,956 QSOs) and Sunday (87 activations, 3,289 QSOs) each contributing a strong showing either side of it.

Unsurprisingly, 40m and 20m carried the bulk of traffic weekend — 278 and 151 activations including those band respectively — with SSB the clear mode of choice (included in 276 activations), with FT8, FM, and CW picking up the vast majority of other QSO.

The busiest time for Bunkerfest 2026, across all three days, was 1000-1100 utc.

Conditions themselves stayed largely kind throughout and Saturday was notably the better day for HF propagation, with a good number finding lower bands difficult on Sunday morning due to the low Critical Frequency and MUF. On the subject of bands it was also good to see a number of VHF, UHF and even one SHF (10GHz) QSO!

Note: the numbers given are based on the data in our WWBOTA database of logs and records as 0800 29th Jul and are likely to increase a little while the final activator logs are received.

Around the WWBOTA Federation

WWBOTA doesn’t do league tables – it’s not a competition – every activation, wherever it happened, added to the same shared total, and every operator who went out this weekend is part of the same story. But it’s worth reflecting a little on the shape of the weekend.

HBBOTA (Switzerland), OKBOTA (Czech Republic), ONBOTA (Belgium), and UKBOTA all had strong, active weekends, with an impressive number of both activators total and bunkers activated. That does not dimins the solid contributions from FBOTA, PABOTA, EIBOTA, S5BOTA, ROBOTA, LXBOTA, DLBOTA, ITABOTA, ERBOTA and others —  all genuinely part of the weekend’s success.

We should remember that natioanl circumstances owe as much to geography — bunker density varies enormously from country to country — as to anything else, and that’s worth remembering before reading too much into any single figure and national level of participation.

One gentle note for next time: a handful of national schemes didn’t record an activation this weekend. No judgement in that — plenty of reasons, good ones, can keep a scheme quiet for a weekend — but Bunkerfest is at its best when as many national communities as possible are part of it, so it’s worth thinking about how to draw those quieter schemes in a little more next time round.

The Moments That Mattered

Numbers only tell part of the story. This was also a weekend of real, human moments: activators pushing through three-day marathons solo, first-timers reaching Diamond and calling it “a pure pleasure,” and no shortage of good-natured banter about who could out-QSO whom. SWLs played their part too — quietly logging what they heard, often just as invested in the weekend as anyone keying up a microphone, and just as welcome in the community for it.

What came through loudest, in log after log and post after post, was simple: people love this. They love the history, they love the personal challenge, they love the community that’s grown up around all of it.

Thank You and see you for Winterfest 2027 (January 2027, date tbc)

The WWBOTA Management Team