BUNKERFEST 2025
We’re excited to share a look back at Bunkerfest 2025—our very first International Festival of Bunkers on the Air—proudly hosted by WWBOTA (Worldwide Bunkers On The Air). Over the weekend of 14–15 June 2025, more than 170 bunkers were activated across 11 countries, thanks to the enthusiasm and efforts of almost 70 activators, as well as a ‘small army’ of hunters and shortwave listeners.
Bunkerfest 2025 was all about community and celebration—not competition—and what made it truly special was the collective effort from all participating schemes (alphabetically): DLBOTA, EABOTA, FBOTA, LABOTA, OKBOTA, ONBOTA, PABOTA, ROBOTA, S5BOTA, UKBOTA, and Z3BOTA. We thank you for every single activation. There are far too many individuals to name here who made Bunkerfest 2025 such a success, so please accept a collective and heartfelt thank you from the WWBOTA team to everyone who played a part. We appreciate every single effort.
We also want to give a warm welcome and thank you to the newest members of the WWBOTA family: EABOTA (Spain) and ROBOTA (Romania). It was great to hear and work your first activations as part of Bunkerfest 2025. It’s fantastic to have you with us!
HF conditions were challenging at times—especially on Saturday—but things improved nicely on Sunday, with activity starting at dawn and continuing well into the evening. Most contacts (QSOs) were made using SSB, with both 40m and 20m being popular, but there was plenty of variety—FT8 was well represented, and we even saw a few contacts made using CW. We were especially pleased to hear so many bunker-to-bunker (B2B) QSOs—hearing bunkers work other bunkers across international borders really brought the international nature of Bunkerfest 2025 to life. On VHF, most QSO were in FM, but there were also some SSB and FT8 QSOs on 6 meters.
The WWBOTA cluster, WhatsApp Spots and Alerts Group and the integration with fieldspotter.radio all held up beautifully throughout the weekend and proved to be a valuable combination of tools for spotting and coordination.
We’ve already started seeing some fantastic photos from activators. We’ve shared a few of these in the WWBOTA Gallery (see the menu item at the top of this page), and we’d love to keep adding more as they come in—so please do keep sending them our way! Similarly, if any activators, hunters, or listeners have stories from Bunkerfest 2025 they’d like to share, please let us know — we’d be delighted to include a section on ‘Stories from Bunkerfest 2025’.
Above all, we just want to say thank you to everyone who took part, everyone who tuned in, and everyone who helped make this first Bunkerfest 2025 such a memorable success.
We’ve laid down a solid foundation, and we’re already excited for what’s ahead.
What next?
The Bunkerfest 2025 page is here if you wish to check the rules, use the score calculators or want more information and how to make an award claim.
If this was your first taste of World Wide Bunkers on the Air, we truly hope you had a fantastic experience! Whether you were tuning in as a hunter or just stumbled across the action by chance, we’d love to welcome you back. There’s a whole world of bunker adventures waiting to be explored — and who knows, maybe next time you’ll even try your hand at activating one yourself! You’ll find plenty of helpful tips and guidance on our homepage, as well as links to the national Bunkers on the Air websites to get you started. Dive in — the airwaves and the bunkers are waiting!
Map of spots
The map below shows the spots as collected by the WWBOTA Cluster. Please note that any activations which were not spotted (either by self spotting or by someone else spotting for the activator) on the WWBOTA Cluster are not shown on the map.
Where an activation was spotted with multiple bunkers (see the note above) then only the first bunker listed is plotted.
Stories from Bunkerfest
M0TRT - Ian
Ian Renton (author of fieldspotter.radio along with many other useful tools) has written an interesting blog post on his Bunkerfest 2025 activations. Click here to read more!
Ian’s useful software tools include:
QSO Map (used in this summary), and
UKBOTA n-fer finder, for UKBOTA.
These, and more, here.
G5STU - Stu
During Bunkerfest 2025 Stu goes in search of a World War 2 GHQ Auxiliary Unit bunker which served as the operating base for the secretive ‘Creech Barrow Seven’, one of many units designed to resist a feared German occupation.
What makes this search for the bunker and Stu’s activation of B/G-1462 all the more poignant is it the auxiliary unit with which Stu’s grandfather served.
Stu is also the author of the popular Station Master logging software, in this video he also trials and demonstrates his new (and free) portable version of Station Master here.
See Stu’s Youtube channel here.
WWBOTA member countries
(Click for national webpages)
Coming Soon
OEBOTA – Austria
HB9BOTA -Switzerland
VEBOTA – Canada
Meet the WWBOTA
Management Team
Coordination – M0ICR (Carl)
m0icr @ live.com
Awards – M0XIC (Mark)
Cluster Magic – M1SDH (Steven)
Email for awards:
awards @ wwbota.org
(C) 2025 WWBOTA – Worldwide Bunkers on the Air