I’m Michael Bell — W3MRB, and I’m an edge-case ham.

Most operator bios lead with the microphone. Mine leads with the bench. I got licensed because radio is the most hands-on physics you can legally run in your garage: RF that you can build, measure, filter, and see on a scope. The contacts are nice. The circuits are the point. General class now, grinding for Amateur Extra — not for the privileges so much as for the theory (Smith charts, filter design, semiconductor physics are genuinely fun once you stop being scared of them).

What that looks like in practice:

  • Homebrew and field radio — QRP, portable HF, and POTA deployments built around gear I can actually understand and repair. See the Ham Rack: a 10-inch 3D-printed field station running off one power-tool battery.
  • 3D printing as the fixture shop — the printer exists to serve the bench: rack mounts, enclosures, panel brackets, the boring parts that make a build real.
  • Local AI on the bench — I run models on my own hardware (Ollama / llama.cpp on a home box), including wiring one up as an Extra-study Elmer.

By day I’m a platform engineer and my team’s AI SME — the deeper story lives on mrbell.dev. This site is the hobby half: the soldering, the field days, the prints, and the study grind, written as a bench log.

QSL / say hi: 73@w3mrb.com · GitHub · LinkedIn