I passed my General exam the same way a lot of people do: I memorized the answers. Not the concepts, not the why — the answers. Question pool goes in, correct letter comes out, and a few weeks later the FCC mails you a piece of paper that says you understand things you don’t. I’m studying for Amateur Extra now, and the...

When I joined the Rowan Amateur Radio Society, the club website ran on WordPress. It worked — until it didn’t, which is the whole problem with WordPress. So I rebuilt it as a static Hugo site and paired it with an AI maintenance workflow, on purpose, so that the next volunteer doesn’t have to be me. The whole thing is...

This is the project that best explains why I got into ham radio in the first place: not to talk, but to build. It’s a complete, field-deployable HF station bolted into a ten-inch 3D-printed rack, powered off a cordless-drill battery, and carried into the woods for POTA. Every module in it is something I wanted to...

I’ll say the quiet part out loud: I’m not really in this for the conversations. Plenty of hams live for the contact — the rare DX on the other side of the planet, the ragchew that runs past midnight, the contest sprint. I respect it. It’s just not the part that pulls me. What pulls me is the bench. The soldering iron,...

I passed my General a while back. Now I’m studying for Amateur Extra — the top US license class — and this post kicks off a series where I work through it in public, from the perspective of someone who’s here for the electronics more than the operating. This first one is about why the Extra material is worth your time...

An Elmer, in ham speak, is a mentor — the experienced operator who answers your dumb questions and gets you on the air. I’m lucky to have real ones. But I’m also an AI engineer with a rack of hardware running large language models in my house, so I’m running an experiment: can a local LLM be a useful second Elmer — a...

Hurricane Helene changed everything for me. As power lines fell and cell towers went dark across the Carolinas, I watched our modern communication infrastructure crumble in real-time. In those critical hours when families desperately needed to reach loved ones, amateur radio operators became the unsung heroes —...