Ham Radio on W3MRB — Ham Radio & 3D Printing

We're Teaching Ham Radio Backwards

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:00:00 -0400

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 memorization strategy has hit a wall. The Extra pool is dense with theory — reactance, Smith charts, filter design, propagation modes — and you can brute-force your way to a passing grade without ever building an intuition for any of it. I could probably still do it. But I’d be doing exactly what I did for General, and I’d walk away from the test knowing less than the license claims I do.

Killing the Club WordPress: A Lift-and-Shift Ham Site Anyone Can Run

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:00:00 -0400

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 designed to lift and shift onto any club that wants it.

The Ham Rack: A Field HF Station in Ten Inches of 3D-Printed Plastic

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:00:00 -0400

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 understand from the inside out — so I put them all in one box and wired them together.

Confessions of an Edge-Case Ham

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

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, the oscilloscope, the moment a circuit I built does the thing physics said it would. I’m an edge-case ham: I do less operating and more tinkering, because I was in this for the electronics long before I ever keyed a mic.

Grinding for Extra: Studying Ham Radio's Hardest Exam as an Engineer

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

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 even if you never care about the extra frequency privileges.

Teaching a Local LLM to Be My Elmer

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

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 patient, always-available tutor for the Extra exam and the bench?

My Amateur Radio License Rejuvenated My Love for Tech — And Why You Should Get One Too

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 16:41:00 -0400

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 — relaying emergency traffic, coordinating rescue efforts, and maintaining vital communication links.

That experience drove me to get my ham radio license. What I didn’t expect was how profoundly it would transform my perspective as an infrastructure engineer.