Homebrew on W3MRB — Ham Radio & 3D Printing https://w3mrb.com/tags/homebrew/ Recent content in Homebrew on W3MRB — Ham Radio & 3D Printing Hugo en Copyright © 2026 Michael Bell (W3MRB). Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:00:00 -0400 The Ham Rack: A Field HF Station in Ten Inches of 3D-Printed Plastic https://w3mrb.com/blog/2026/07/the-ham-rack/ Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:00:00 -0400 https://w3mrb.com/blog/2026/07/the-ham-rack/ 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 https://w3mrb.com/blog/2026/07/edge-case-ham/ Sun, 12 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400 https://w3mrb.com/blog/2026/07/edge-case-ham/ 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.

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