A rainy-week rant sparked by a POTA comment thread: ham radio was never obligated to entertain anyone, and pretending otherwise is cheapening the hobby.

J002E3 gets a routine ID check. It fails — and on the other side of the world, someone starts calculating odds.

Record flooding hits East Central Indiana after ten inches of rain — the White River crests at 18.6 feet, and the ham shack takes on water.

A new chapter of The Second Rock, fallout from the Honor Roll's Age Problem post, and a call for clear emergency frequencies after a 7.4 quake in Colombia.

At least twelve entities are effectively unworkable, yet Honor Roll still requires 331. A look at why the program may need to change and why that change won't please everyone.

Sixty-six million years ago, one impactor found Earth. The second one is already inbound — and no one on Terminus Station knows it yet.

Why hams do it: fraternity, DXing, contesting, home-brewing, and public service — plus how to get licensed in the US, from exam basics to ARRL membership.

A long QSO on 20 meters turns into a trip through modems, Mosaic, and what the internet promised versus what it became.

A relaxing getaway to Holland, Michigan — artisan shops, Lake Michigan beaches, and a surprise sighting of the new American Patriot cruise ship.

Publicly available WRTC 2026 logs are revealing odd multiplier patterns. No accusations here — just contesters doing what they do.

A dropped spoon, a vanishing act, and an old Art Bell story about objects slipping into another dimension — plus a morning spent with a 2009 rerun instead of the usual 40-meter net.

A graybeard rediscovers that decent handwriting is a perishable skill — and orders a cursive workbook to fix it.

Reforms to ham radio licensing around FT8. I'm not buying it — betting a whole license class on a fad, right as digital detox arrives.

An evening spin on 20 meters turns up casual rag chews instead of POTA traffic, a quick QSO with HA7GN, a new-band catch via the WAS 250 event, and heavy rain cuts short the session.

MB2M (VE3DZ/UW7LL) took the 2026 WRTC title in England — plus a look at what radios the fifty competing teams used, with Elecraft leading the pack.

A light week for new posts, but the archive is getting resurfaced — old favorites reappearing daily from a 4,000+ post back catalog, plus a long-overdue about page still in the works.

Bob Locher, W9KNI, is a DXing legend with Collins Radio roots. His new OnAllBands series kicks off with the hunt for ZD9, Gough Island.

Nearly 48 years after a fatal 1978 Jeep accident took his future brother-in-law, the author steps away from ham radio to document the full story.

A little ham radio poem from somewhere back in our long ago

Casual evening calling CQ on the bands.

Digging through the CQ Magazine archive turns up vanished advertisers, a career pipeline that dried up, Wayne Green's early hustle, and DXCC trivia worth chasing.

Fifty years after America's bicentennial, a ham radio operator reflects on 1976, nostalgia, and why this Fourth of July feels different.

WRTC 2026 kicks off in the UK this July — the once-every-four-years 'Olympics of contesting.' Here's what to know, and how to work all 50 special event stations for an award.

From satirical fiction to retirement reflections — a look back at June's highlights before the summer heat takes over.

The complete CQ Magazine archive is online and it's a wormhole into amateur radio history. My wallet and my afternoon both took a hit.

Remembering W4RSS, a gregarious old-school ham who became a good friend over coffee and radio talk.

Summer strolls, barbershop rumors, and the moving walkway of life.

Revisiting a 1922 history of amateur radio — the 1912 laws, ham radio's WWI contributions, and its first decade in America.

Upcoming QRP field radio event

Marking Alban Hefin, the summer solstice in Druidry — a reflection on the year's peak of light and the 'in-between' places nature holds sacred.

After two decades without one, a return to the printed newspaper — subscribing to the New York Times print edition and rediscovering an old-fashioned pleasure.

A morning in the ham radio shack — CQ calls on CW, pipe tobacco, tea, and the slower pace retirement makes possible.

The Summer E-season is always fun and occasionally exciting. Don’t miss it!

Twenty-five hours without power has me pricing a $14,500 Generac system again — or wondering if a few solar panels and batteries would do just fine.

A satirical dispatch from 2029, where an AI service works CW, phone, and FT8 on your behalf — filling logbooks with DXCC and contest wins while you're at Disney World. Progress, or the end of the hobby?

An email pitching a bot that runs your FT8 contacts for you raises an old question: is anyone actually on the other end anymore? And is a fully automated mode still worth the wall space.

A firmware update's noise reduction has me using Phone more than CW again — and now a K4 to K4D upgrade kit is here, promising dual-receiver diversity reception. Time to find out if it delivers.

Field Day 2026 is here — my plan is the same as always: backyard, batteries, and the shade, until the club event down the road tempts me for a quick visit and a fast retreat.

The recent UFO file release didn't make many headlines — except for the clergy and officials calling it demons, not aliens. A quick reaction to a strange turn in the story.

Activity curator Paul Harden, NA5N announces the end of QRP to the Field, citing how POTA has made outdoor low-power operating mainstream enough that dedicated QRP field events are no longer needed.

Ham radio YouTube has a certain look these days — beards, man buns, artisanal lattes. This blog stays a wall of words on white, circa 1996, and that's a feature, not a bug.

Peak Oil, gas prices, and geopolitics have me thinking about 'place' again — why the backyard ham shack beats the $250k motorhome plan for staying radio active without burning gasoline.

Late-cycle solar enhancement lit up 10, 12, and 15 meters over the holiday weekend, delivering new Chilean contacts and a full digital-mode run before the Habs game took priority.

Europe's largest ham radio convention returns to Friedrichshafen June 26-28, 2026, with an astronomy theme, ASTRO trade fair, and speaker Rabea Rogge, the first German woman in space.

A tribute to my father's Greatest Generation life, paired with a reflection on ham radio's own generational shifts — from spark to CW a century ago, to FT8 today.

The Daily DX switches to PDF format, sparking a mobile-reading gripe — and an AI-powered workaround that turns the inconvenience into a better DX alert system.

Firehose notes from Dayton Hamvention 2026 — fairgrounds highlights, the DX Dinner, an ARRL keynote, and why this may be my last trip to Xenia.

Elecraft's new Spectral Subtraction Noise Reduction (SSNR) update dramatically improves K4 receive performance — and may soon come to the KX2 and KX3.

A modest four-contact log for the Canadian Prairies QSO Party turns into a saga of Cabrillo conversion, N1MM+ frustrations, and finding software's 'Ultimate Doo-Dad.'

A wistful Hamvention-week check-in — mowing the lawn, dinner plans in Dayton — that turns into a tribute to the late, decrepit Hara Arena and its long-gone 1980s heyday.

A sunny walk stirs up small-town nostalgia — self-serve kiosk gripes, a wistful longing for boyhood games of catch and the Big Red Machine, and a case for paying bills and banking in person.

Estate planning prompts a reflection on what ham radio has given back over a lifetime — career, community, even a marriage — and a decision to join the ARRL Diamond Club as a way of paying it forward.

A morning chat with Claude about whether he's missing anything by avoiding social media, weighing his exit from Twitter/X against a case for reviving his dormant Mastodon account to reach the ham radio crowd.

A wry riff on solar cycles as the real astrology, tracing Cycle 25's peak and coming decline into minimum, and what that means for HF band conditions and DX chasing.

Reorganizing decades of ham radio gear and republishing old fiction — paring life down to a CW rig, a wire antenna, and a patio margarita, so the kids don't have to sort it all out later.

A centuries-old immortal recounts to his dying friend the strange path that led him from a 1919 London seance to a 1935 meeting with ARRL founder Hiram Percy Maxim — and his lingering suspicion that Maxim's death was faked.

A teenage ham radio operator befriends the mysterious, ageless recluse next door — and decades later, at his own 90th birthday in a nursing home, still asks his immortal friend to retell the story of meeting Hiram Percy Maxim.

Rainy-day musings on lawns, lockdown-mode antennas, a home lab nearing completion, fending off bots — and wondering where all the ham radio bloggers went.

The Titanic's SOS didn't just make history — it helped create amateur radio as we know it today.

A look at ARRL CEO David Minster's April 2026 QST column and why most criticism of ARRL falls apart under basic scrutiny.

Old and new books, filled with treasure and adventure, reading never gets old.

Storm-shortened DX session chasing 3Y0K on Bouvet, plus a look at a home-brew W1AW receiver design and why I'm holding off on building it.

An Indiana writer traces his fascination with migration stories—from his wife's family's move from Alabama for auto jobs to piecing together lives through obituaries.

Another trip around the sun completed

The East Coast Reflector connects hams nationwide across IRLP, DMR, Fusion, D-STAR, and more — a rag-chewing community built by WB2JPQ, including a daily 'Morning Brew' net.

A 19-year-old Radio Officer's 1970s cargo ship memoir pairs well with morning coffee and a bowl of pipe tobacco—a book review with a maritime radio history bent.

Life is upended when things go wonky on a global scale.

A tall-tale conspiracy: a ham radio inventor's secret miracle antenna threatened to level the playing field between rich and poor operators — until secret societies allegedly buried 5,000 of them in the New Mexico desert and made him disappear.

Here we go again, another trip around the Sun. HNY!

A ham radio operator overhears a stranger's parable about counting out life's remaining Saturdays with marbles — and it changes how he spends the day with his own family.

A play-by-play of a nuclear stress test — treadmill, radioactive dye, gamma camera and all — prompted by an elevated calcium heart scan, with normal results in hand but a cardiologist follow-up still to come.

2026's shack setup: a K4, full legal-limit amp, and a single 20-meter dipole—stripped down for one goal, single-band DX with delusions of grandeur.

A tongue-in-cheek dialogue skewers the irony of 'real hams' who route every net contact through internet-streamed remote receivers — just don't call it a video call.

From what I have observed, the older you get, the less input you have in many of these kinds of decisions

A 1932 QST letter finds a ham already nostalgic for crystal sets and tongue-tested headphones—turns out every generation thinks the 'good old days' just ended.

Two old hams debate how amateur radio will finally die, over biscuits and gravy at their dwindling Saturday breakfast club—a short story on fading traditions.

Adding Pagefind, a fully static search library, to the blog — up and running in five minutes without any external search engine or hosted infrastructure.

Ron VE3VN's post on losing the DXCC chase struck a chord—this ham operator agrees the hobby changed too, not just the operator.

After 208 years, the Farmers' Almanac is calling it quits—and it's got this ham radio operator thinking about what we lose when print fades to digital.

A self-described 'Electric Amish ham operator makes the case for simpler radio gear—when NetLogger crashes and Windows updates kill your station, a 1961 Vibroplex bug still works.

Considering a metal roof but worried it'll wreck your HF antennas? One ham radio operator weighs the tradeoffs—and shares a cautionary tale from a fellow op Down Under.

Streaming video over HF using low-bandwidths...

Ringing in 2025 with the blog's 2024 stats tallied — nearly 57,000 visitors — and a fresh spark of inspiration from a fellow ham's CW-focused year to shift focus back to the key.

Closing out 2024 with no resolutions and no plans to attend Hamvention again — but a slow ease into '25 turns up quiet goals anyway: WAS holdouts on 40 and 80, a few contests, and learning the bug.

A quiet house after a full, noisy Christmas with kids, grandchildren, and 47 years of marriage — reflecting on a holiday that ended too soon this year.

A solar storm brings the Northern Lights to Indiana, sparking a reflection on my grandmother's folk explanation for the aurora versus modern-day conspiracy theories.

A five-station, 24/7 DXpedition to Nauru (C21MM) launching October 2024 — covering 160-6m in CW, SSB, FT8, and RTTY.

Reflecting on his beloved Elecraft K2 (built in 1999), the author weighs whether using the KX3 has stirred up temptation to order a K4 before October price increases.

In 1924, during a close Mars-Earth opposition, the U.S. Navy actually imposed nationwide radio silence for five minutes every hour so observatories could listen for Martian signals.

G-QRP Club marks 50 years since its 1974 founding with an anniversary coffee mug, a golden SPRAT-on-a-Stick, a special SPRAT Extra issue, and the Low & Clear September 2024 activity period.

Behind ARRL's million-dollar ransom payment: organized crime, a communications blackout, and what it means for LoTW's future.

Propagation problem or operator errors?

Was LoTW's recovery really a win? A critique of ARRL's communication failures during the 50-day ransomware outage.

When Brazil flooded, it was Starlink terminals — not ham radio — that showed up. A look at what that means for EMCOMM.

Easter Island's DXpedition ran on Starlink — and it's a harbinger for the future (or end) of ham radio emergency comms.

Working VK6AS in Bull Creek, Australia on 20 meters, and a look at the farthest DX contacts logged — all from the vast reaches of VK-land.

Things aren't exactly as they seem out on Cornbread Road.

Skipping Hamvention again after nearly forty years of near-perpetual attendance — not from loss of health or interest exactly, but a quiet reckoning with fading friends, a changed venue, and knowing when enough is enough.

Halley's Comet has begun its journey back toward Earth, sparking some napkin math on who'll be around to see its 2061 return, plus a December ham radio update: 262 contacts on the IC-705 and a 2023 total near 2K QSOs and 105 entities.

An unexpected all-time-new-one on ten meters via FT4 — and a reminder of the eternal DX truth: it's rare if you don't have it.

NM0S Electronics has revived the legendary NorCal 40A as the NorCal 40B, a single-band 40m QRP CW transceiver kit with modern components and a pre-drilled enclosure.

Retirement was supposed to mean flipping to a nocturnal DX schedule for weak-signal chasing, but at 10pm sharp the eyelids win anyway — until Bouvet Island's 3Y0J forces the issue.

Ringing in 2023 with lowered expectations after a year of pandemic turned geopolitical turmoil — just asking the new year to sit down, shut up, and not touch anything.

Ham radio has lost another good one...

After 40+ years as an engineer, retiring at 62 into life's 'third act — no set plans beyond more writing, more ham radio, and the endless to-do list that comes with owning a home.

A wave of grant money is flooding into ham radio, and while it could fund real innovation, it also risks creating winners, losers, and hidden strings for clubs chasing it.

WA3RNC's follow-up to the TR-25, the TR-35 covers 40/30/20/17 meters at 5 watts, available factory-built or as a kit starting January 17th.

Ringing in 2022 fresh off the least active radio year in 45 years, with retirement weeks away, a fresh Walden reading pushing a return to minimalist QRP/CW, and modest hopes for a pandemic comeback year.

Remembering Jim Stafford, W4QO — QRP Hall of Famer, longtime friend, and mentor of over 20 years, following his passing.

A firsthand account of attending the funeral of Oris Brandt, a Hoosier sailor killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, whose remains were identified in 2019.

Remembering a mentor who traded nightly letters via two-meter RTTY and a tape punch machine, and wondering whether anyone still uses RTTY for casual rag chews instead of just contesting.

Rumors swirl that ham radio handhelds helped coordinate the Capitol riot—and some want the hobby to become a haven for those banned elsewhere.

A gray, mild winter with spring still seventy wake-ups away, set against a genuinely dark week — insurrection, a raging pandemic, and real doubt about where the country goes from here.

FCC sets $35 license fees but declares amateur radio 'not an emergency radio service — a stark reminder of where hams actually stand.

Another New Year's reading of Walden stirs the same old pull toward radio simplicity — trading the gear pile for wire antennas and a station that only gently disturbs the aether.