ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio® has published its 2025 Annual Report, which includes a summary of the year’s program activities, along with the 2025 and 2024 financial statements and an independent auditor’s report.
The report shares accomplishments across education, advocacy, emergency communications, publications, technology, and member services, while recognizing members, vol…
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On July 27, July 30, and August 1, 2026, members of the Green Bay Mike and Key Club, who are also members of the Brown-Kewaunee County Amateur Radio Emergency Service® (ARES®), deployed to Winnebago County, Wisconsin, following a tornado that struck on July 27. The tornado hit Appleton and caused severe damage in Menasha, Fox Crossing, and nearby communities, with peak winds estimated at 140 mp…
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The FCC Enforcement Bureau has issued a Notice of Violation to Gary M. Beckstedt, Sr., of Newnan, Georgia, for operating a network of nearly two dozen linked General Mobile Radio Service (GMRS) repeaters in violation of FCC rules for the service. Beckstedt is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of North Georgia GMRS, Inc., and licensee of GMRS station WQYU407. He also holds amateur radio lic…
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ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio® introduced the ARRL America250 Worked All States (WAS) operating event this year. If you’ve already confirmed contacts with all 50 states, you can now order your commemorative award certificate. The attractive, frame-worthy certificate celebrates your participation in this once-in-a-lifetime event honoring America’s 250th anniversary.
ARRL is a S…
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Cory Golob, KU1U, of Sabattus, Maine, has been appointed as the ARRL Maine Section Manager as of August 3, 2026. Golob succeeds Philip Duggan, N1EP, who concluded his term as Section Manager on June 30 after serving since December 2021.
“I want to do the very best for amateur radio in the ARRL Maine Section and build on what our previous Section Manager, Phil Duggan has accomplished,” said Golob…
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In an effort to maintain updated ARRL Affiliated Club records, ARRL The National Association for Amateur Radio® is urging radio clubs to complete the required annual Affiliated Club review now. The annual review requires nothing more than reviewing club information such as the club email addresses and contact information. Clubs should also test their listed email to ensure it is accurate and wo…
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Solar activity has been at low levels, with occasional B-class flaring and isolated low-level C-class flares observed. The largest event of the period was a C1.6/Sf flare on August 5 from Region 4502.
The six numbered sunspot regions on the visible disk are mostly stable or in varying stages of decay. Region 4498 showed a slight decrease in penumbral extent. Region 4499 declined in length and …
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Here’s the headline: New Debian 13 “Trixie” Kernel Security Update Fixes 68 Vulnerabilities. The takeaway: If you’re running AllStarLink (ASL) on Debian 13, it’s time to update.
Welcome to Random Wire issue 194. Sometime in the past week, subscriber numbers hit 2,300…and kept climbing. This was a surprise because a few dozen subscribers ended their subscriptions last week, too.
This week, I got my MeshCore repeater functioning. The problem was a simple on-off switch I failed to see when I put the repeater into service the first time.
I also got a T-Echo (not the newer Plus version) configured as a LoRa APRS Tracker. It is communicating with my LoRa APRS igate/digipeater in the garage.
Building a MeshCore Node — Part 2: The Repeater That Should Have Been Easy — Part 1 ended with a MeshCore repeater configured in ten minutes and beaconing right on schedule — a clean win, or so it seemed. Part 2 is the two weeks that followed. I encountered a debugging tool that was quietly resetting the very device I was troubleshooting, my antenna’s blind spot, a paywalled feature with a free workaround that didn’t actually work, and a repeater that went dark for five days over something hiding in plain sight the whole time. By the end, the hardware and firmware check out clean. What doesn’t check out, it turns out, is the ten miles of Pacific Northwest terrain standing between me and my nearest MeshCore neighbor.
LoRa APRS: Part 2 — LoRa APRS Tracker with a T-Echo — A brand-new LilyGo T-Echo goes dark after a routine firmware flash — no display update, a red LED blinking like an alarm, and every obvious fix leading nowhere. What follows is a genuine debugging rabbit hole: a Windows error that’s secretly good news, a bootloader chase that turns out to be a red herring, an independent firmware swap that finally proves the hardware was fine all along, and a BLE pairing quirk that ends up eating more time than everything else combined. If you’ve ever stared at a “bricked” board and had to figure out which symptoms were real and which were noise, this is that story, from first red flag to a live beacon on aprs.fi.
Weekly Report: August 6, 2026 — Catch up on band conditions, digital radio news, and the Groups.io digest.
My little Talk2Me PoC (push-to-talk over cellular) radio is working quite nicely. Last Saturday, I had a long drive to a high school class reunion. Unfortunately, that drive coincided with Saturday’s weekly M17 net. The M17 net is always interesting and I learn a lot every time I tune in.
To the rescue: my Talk2Me radio. I already had it set to listen to America’s Kansas City Wide network using Hamlink PoC (programmed into the radio by the vendor). So while driving at 60 MPH toward Tacoma, Washington, I turned it on, turned up the volume a couple of notches, and slipped it into the chest pocket of my shirt. I listened to the complete net during the drive and even checked in from the pickup truck.
I usually pick up the M17 net at home over my hotspot, or with BlueDV on my laptop, or with my M17 radio and an M17 hotspot. Before the Talk2Me radio, I could not get KC Wide over RF while I’m driving in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Now I can listen in and participate, thanks to my Talk2Me STANDARD PLUS radio.
Honestly, I’m quite impressed. Because of this fabulous little radio, I was able to enjoy one of my favorite nets while I traveled to my reunion. The radio? It. Just. Worked. Isn’t that what we really want? For our devices to just work? This one does.
I finally got my MeshCore repeater working. I don’t know why I so often get a product without any instructions, but in this case, there was supposed to be a card inside the box…and there wasn’t. So I experimented for days, trying different things. Finally, I put my magnifying visor on and took a careful look at the boards inside, only to discover an on-off switch! It was a small little slider, hiding from my unmagnified view.
After sliding it to the on position and charging the 18650 battery, I put the repeater outside on top of the gutter. (By this time, I had been up and down the ladder at least a dozen times to place/retrieve the repeater on the roof. Testing on the gutter was a lot easier and safer than climbing up on the roof over and over.) And it worked. It beaconed on startup, but more importantly, it beaconed regularly after that.
About a day later, it showed up on the MeshCore map:
I’m still getting to know how this all works. I can’t reach other stations directly with my handheld device (T-Deck Plus), which is why I put up a repeater. Currently, my local MeshCore chain has three pieces: a repeater, a relay, and an app. The PeakMesh repeater is on the roof. A LilyGo T-Echo Plus at 910MHz with Bluetooth serves as a relay between the repeater and my phone. The MeshCore app is on my Android phone.
I also have a LilyGo T-Deck Plus at 910MHz with internal antenna that is a portable, handheld device. It isn’t a necessary part of my MeshCore chain.
If you happen to be using a MeshCore device, try adding the #etherham channel and pushing a message my way. That would be fun to try.
It works! The LoRa APRS igate/digipeater I installed in the garage actually works. The range? Minuscule, but more on that in a moment.
I bought a second LilyGo T-Deck Plus on 433MHz and configured it as a LoRa APRS tracker. Then I went for a drive. My igate/digi (KJ7T-2) picked up the mobile tracker (KJ7T-3) about 1/8 mile from the digi. It works.
But it only works for a short distance. The small external antenna on the T-Deck Plus is insufficient for much range when the igate/digi is located in a basin…and that is what a lake is: a topographic low filled with water. I’m surrounded by hills so that tiny antenna doesn’t stand much of a chance of getting a signal out.
You can actually see the signal strength (RSSI = Received Signal Strength Indicator) drop off as I drove away from my igate/digi (KJ7T-2) yesterday morning.
SNR (signal-to-noise ratio, in dB) is arguably the more meaningful number here. It describes how far above the noise floor the signal actually was, which is what determines whether the receiver can hear it well enough to decode it at all.
Looking at the photo, the oldest is at the bottom of the list of three exchanges. The signal went from -61 RSSI/SNR 7 (strong, near the start of the drive) down to -107/-5 and then to -117/-14 as I drove farther away, right before it dropped out entirely around 1/3 mile distant.
Here’s something worth noting: successfully decoding at -14 dB SNR is a real demonstration of LoRa’s advantage over conventional radio. FM APRS generally needs a positive SNR to decode anything — LoRa’s chirp spread-spectrum modulation (especially at SF12, which you’re running) has enough processing gain to pull a signal out well below the noise floor. That last successful frame wasn’t a fluke; it’s LoRa working as designed, right up until the combination of distance and terrain finally buried it.
I’m considering putting up the dual-band dipole antenna I have on order (note: ordered more than a month ago and my emails to the company are bouncing!) on a pole outside the garage. Maybe I can try a diplexer and run the LightAPRS Gateway on the VHF dipole and the LoRa APRS igate/digipeater on the UHF dipole. Two devices, one feedline, a diplexer, and the dual-band antenna. Just another 10-15 feet in clear air and I’ll bet I can reach at least a mile away on LoRa.
As noted in the New on EtherHam section above, I configured the T-Echo (not the Plus) as a LoRa APRS tracker. The advantage of the T-Echo is long battery life. It’s a small device so I can easily tuck it out of the way inside the pickup truck cab.
I use Claude. I use ChatGPT. At the suggestion of a friend, I’ve started using Gemini a bit more. And now I’m exploring DeepSeek, which I’m finding to be very fast…but also more shallow than those other engines. Whether it will stand up to Claude when it comes to coding, I don’t yet know, but I doubt it. I’ve added DeepSeek to my Open Notebook instance running on my Proxmox server.
One thing to be aware of with DeepSeek: it stores API data on servers in China and its terms permit training on your inputs by default. I don’t plan to use it for anything important, but if you handle sensitive information, you’ll want to bear this in mind if you choose to use DeepSeek.
Me? I still lean toward Claude for the things I do.
Pulled from the aggregated feeds on EtherHam (etherham.com/feeds/), items from July 30–August 5. This Short Stack turned into a Long Stack!
Scanner Command: Mapping Incidents from Live Radio Calls and ADS-B to Airband Voice with AI — RTL-SDR Blog — A follow-on to DeepSDR: another public-safety-scanner-plus-LLM incident mapper, this time tied to airband/ADS-B traffic.
Turning a Local ADS-B Feed Into an Easy to Read Dashboard — N3BKV’s Ham Radio Hacks — Building a clean dashboard on top of a SkyAware feed to see what’s flying overhead.
Large-scale LoRaWAN deployments become easier through QR codes and relays — CNX Software — QR-code provisioning and relay support aimed at simplifying big LoRaWAN rollouts.
bkjbbs: A Node.js Packet Radio BBS Library for Direwolf — Hamradio.my — A modern Node.js library for running a packet BBS on Direwolf, with full AX.25/KISS support and TypeScript types.
Retevis C62 OpenRTX port and the cskburn update — M17 Project News — Progress notes on the OpenRTX port for the Retevis C62, alongside LinHT work.
Wanneton UV5F Ham Radio Handheld Dual Band Two-Way Radio Review — Amateur Radio Today — A hands-on look at a budget dual-band HT aimed at entry-level and emergency-prep users.
The Best Inexpensive HF Antennas for Amateur Radio — Amateur Radio Today — Pushing back on the idea that HF requires an expensive antenna.
Chameleon LEFS Feather Antenna QRP with the Elecraft KX3 — J-Pole Antenna — QRP field pairing of the Chameleon LEFS Feather with a KX3.
Build Your Own DIY Compact FM Transmitter — Hackster.io — A step-by-step 88–108 MHz FM transmitter build.
A Homebrew Workbench from Norway — Please Comment: What would you have done differently? — Solder Smoke — A reader’s shack workbench, with Bill Meara asking for critique.
But did he really create this device? What do you think? — Solder Smoke — A skeptical look at a dubious “invention” video making the rounds.
A Wet POTA Experiment: Hunting, Calling CQ, and Changing Modes — QRPer — Mark (KB2PIZ) on how long to stick with a band/mode before switching things up during an activation.
CE7ET: Mini POTA DXpedition to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) CL-0105 / 3G0YT — QRPer — A POTA activation report from one of the more remote parks you’ll see on the air.
DF7CW: Field Testing the IC-705 and SOTAmāt in Märkische Schweiz (DE-0083) Before a Swedish Trail Adventure — QRPer — A newly-licensed German ham field-testing gear ahead of a bigger trip.
The best-laid plans do work out, after you pivot a few times — QRPer — Vince (VE6LK) on activation plans that only came together after repeated pivots.
More POTA notes, 7/30/26 — KB6NU — Dan’s real-world notes on running down the limits of a 9 Ahr BioEnno battery across activations.
9M LLOTA: Malaysia Joins Lakes and Lagoons On The Air — Hamradio.my — Malaysia’s entry into the Lakes and Lagoons On The Air program, with a growing reference list.
A New Novel from DXer Ralph W. Perry: Pacific Dream — The SWLing Post — A longtime DXer’s new novel gets a nod from the SWLing community.
Illustrated Radio Listening Report reaching Nepal — The SWLing Post — Cartoonist Carlos Latuff’s illustrated QSL-style reports have made it further than he expected.
Radio Prague: “Microphones against tanks” — The SWLing Post — The latest in Radio Prague International’s history series on Czech broadcasting.
BBC Radio 5 Live Closing More AM Transmitters — The SWLing Post — The BBC continues trimming its mediumwave footprint.
Pirate Radio on the HF Bands: The Hidden World of Shortwave Broadcasting — Amateur Radio Today — A survey of the pirate shortwave scene for hams who make contacts but rarely just listen.
Ham College 142 — Amateur Radio Weekly — General exam prep covering transmitter power rules and 60-meter operation.
LHS Episode #624: National Jamboree 2026 — Amateur Radio Weekly — Linux in the Ham Shack’s coverage of this year’s National Jamboree.
Amateur Radio Weekly – Issue 432 — Amateur Radio Weekly — This week’s roundup, leading with a Kentucky family suing after a school resource officer seized a student’s radios without a warrant.
Legendary DXer Bob Locher, W9KNI, Presents Tales from a Serial Sniper Part 2, “Looking South” — On All Bands — Part two of Bob Locher’s DXing memoirs.
Talking to Silent Keys — With Varying Frequency — A reflective piece on how the community keeps engaging with the memory of hams who’ve become Silent Keys.
One lump or two (or three)? — KB6NU — Dan’s take on the perennial argument over how many license classes ham radio should have.
Proxmox releases full support for the Arm64 architecture, with a few key caveats — XDA Developers — Arm64 support lands, but access is request-only for now.
Proxmox ships with a broken repo by design, and here’s the 30-second fix every home user needs — XDA Developers — The rite-of-passage repo fix for every fresh Proxmox install.
NightRun UEFI application boots a local LLM on Raspberry Pi 5 and x86 PCs without an OS — CNX Software — Running an LLM straight from firmware, no OS required — relevant if you’re squeezing extra life out of Pi-based nodes.
3 Raspberry Pi Projects I Use Every Day — Raspberry Tips — Practical, daily-driver Pi projects rather than one-off builds.
Jellyfin vs Plex on Raspberry Pi: Which Is Best? — Raspberry Tips — A head-to-head for anyone running a Pi as a media server.
A Mac Mini server is running headless in my closet — it manages my photo library and handles my backups — Tom’s Hardware — A refurbished Mac Mini pulling backup and photo-library duty.
AppFlowy finally feels like real Notion, and self-hosting it fixed my biggest complaint — XDA Developers — A self-hosted Notion alternative that’s matured enough to switch to.
Issue 522 – Minimus Releases Hardened Images For Free – What Does It Do Differently? — Awesome Self Hosted newsletter — Free hardened container images, and what sets them apart.
My router was doing 5 things that I never asked it to, and I wish I had changed them earlier — XDA Developers — Default router settings worth turning off.
This E-Ink Home Assistant display cut my phone notifications in half — How-To Geek — An always-on e-ink dashboard for Home Assistant that pulls attention off the phone.
I turned an old Android phone into a Home Assistant voice satellite—no speaker needed — How-To Geek — A cheap way to repurpose old hardware, in the same spirit as hotspot/node builds.
AI enthusiast unlocks and mods BIOS with Claude Code — AI defeats RSA-2048 signature checks and unlocks 55 hidden settings — Tom’s Hardware — A Redditor used Claude Code to unlock a laptop’s hidden BIOS settings.
I do enjoy reading radio history, and The Discovery of Radio Waves was an article I found very interesting.
“When the concept of electromagnetic waves was first proposed around 1864, it was met with great skepticism…It took several decades for a handful of dedicated persons — infatuated with the mysteries of electricity and magnetism — to finally put the theory on a solid footing.”
Just proves to me once again that we all stand on the good work of those who came before us.
As I was debugging a CSS load problem (the problem being a specific file was not loading) on a website, I started to use a tried-and-true method: turn off plugins one by one, test, re-enable, move to the next plugin. Well, this site has 67 plugins and that takes an awfully long time.
And then I thought: I wonder if Claude can help me with this? Using the Sonnet model, Claude had trouble understanding what I wanted and kept trying to hand it back to me. So I switched to the Opus 5 model and was delighted when — after I gave it permission — it proceeded to walk through all 67 plugins and test them, without me having to intervene.
Claude found one plugin that no longer parsed CSS after the plugin was recently updated. We rolled that back to a previous version, resolving the problem. That saved me hours of digging.
I’m enjoying learning about this technology. New? Not…but it feels new to me, simply because while I’ve dabbled my toes in the LoRa waters, I haven’t taken a dive like in the past several weeks. It’s interesting stuff, especially how it is able to send and receive data way below the noise floor.
73, and remember to touch a radio every day!
Solar activity has remained at low levels. Region 4494 exhibited decay in its trailing spots as its flare activity subsided. Region 4498 rotated into better viewing positioning, revealing mixed polarity just behind its large leading spot, and was responsible for a handful of low-level C-class flares.
Region 4499 underwent evolution, gaining additional spots and producing a low-level C-class flar…
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Wow, what a week! Not much time for radio, but the coding bug dug in deep this week.
The Random Wire newsletter is the journal of what I’m doing during the week, and serves as a companion to EtherHam.com where more detailed, technical content gets published. I hope you enjoy both the newsletter and the website.
I enjoy hearing from readers and hope you’ll share what is on your workbench!
KJ7T Tom
Not a lot of radio play this week, as I got caught up in “the zone” while coding for my day job. Two days in a row, I started in on a project and when I looked up, the clock said ten hours had elapsed. It’s been a while since I entered a flow state like this. I kind of miss it. Time flies and the work can be very satisfying. (If you code, you know.)
What did I do? First, I rebuilt an issues-and-actions tracker for work that covers a five-year rolling time period. Then I converted a +800-person directory from a PDF document to an online database embedded in a WordPress site, to help my work team keep our member information updated. This was honestly much more complicated than it sounds.
For the online directory, I also added some protection against scrapers (bots that grab everyone’s email from a website). Emails in the directory are never displayed in the public HTML page, instead being protected by signed tokens and a rate limit with a lockout if exceeded. Clicking the email link opens a “reveal page” that shows the email address as visible text (with an app-launch attempt on top). The reveal links are rate-limited per visitor, so a bot trying to harvest hundreds of addresses in bulk gets throttled and locked out — a real visitor clicking a few links will likely never notice.
And then one of my work teammates cranked up our annual conference web pages and asked for help, resulting in another day two days of revisions and coding. Along the way, I found several plugins that were weighing down every page. Click click, poof — they are gone, and what they were doing has been replaced with some custom fields, Cascading Style Sheet magic, and a few custom-built plugins. I saved a lot of memory overhead and the pages load faster. Yes, satisfying.
Ultimately, we ended up with a group of custom plugins, all nested together under “Conference” in our Dashboard menu. This will help us manage most of the content for our annual conference and business meeting. It will also greatly reduce the repetitive entries we would normally make in the actual HTML pages. That will mean fewer errors and less time spent figuring out all the little gotchas that can be so hard to find in hundreds and hundreds of lines of content.
I was able to hang out on the M17 net last Saturday, using my Talk2Me PoC radio and, out of curiosity, simultaneously listening with BlueDV on my laptop. The M17 net is always educational, and it’s fun to hear about the continued evolution of M17 as a protocol, in hardware, and in apps like MSeven.
If you click this Talk2Me PoC radio link, you’ll discover a new feature I’m just starting to build out at EtherHam.com: a compendium of the gear I’ve used, reviewed, or recommended. I’m just getting a start on this so content is light. Translation: more to do!
I also finished up my series on push-to-talk over cellular radios and started a new series on MeshCore. Still in process are some articles on DMR.
APRS continues to be on my mind. I run it in my pickup truck on my Yaesu FTM-300D mobile radio…and on my phone with APRSdroid. But I also have the LightAPRS Gateway (a VHF 1-watt fill-in digi and igate) in the garage, and now a LoRa APRS igate/digi (UHF) running about 100 milliwatts. I’m waiting on another T-Deck Plus built around 433MHz so I can play with APRS messaging over the LoRa APRS station.
In summary, it was a week of coding with some radio and writing, too. As Julie Andrews sang:
♫ These are a few of my favorite things ♫
Push-to-Talk Over Cellular: The Buyer’s Checklist — Part 4 of 4. Part 1 was the lot walk. Part 2 was my own radio purchase, start to finish. Part 3 was the radio itself, on the bench and on the road. Part 4 is the short version — everything worth checking, without the weeks it took me to learn it. Three articles, several weeks, and my own money all contributed to this list. If you only read one piece in this series, spend your time with this one.
Building a MeshCore Node — Part 1: Why, What, and How — CascadiaMesh, the MeshCore community covering the Pacific Northwest, promises you can get on the mesh in three easy steps: pick a device, flash it, pair it to your phone. I wanted to test that claim the honest way — buy the hardware, do exactly what the guide says, and see where it actually breaks. Spoiler for Part 1: it worked fine. Flashing a LilyGo T-Echo Plus turned up one genuine hardware-vs-host-computer mystery (solved), and getting a companion radio talking to a repeater took about as long as promised. Part 2, where I will cover building and configuring a MeshCore repeater, is where things promise to get more interesting.
Expanding Technician Privileges: The Fix Needs a Push — There’s a real, already-written fix for one of Technician licensees’ most common complaints — and it’s been sitting in an FCC docket since 2018. The petition would open modern digital modes like FT8 to Technicians on 75, 40, and 15 meters, plus some phone privileges, with almost no opposition on record. Seven years later, it’s still stuck — not from pushback, but from plain bureaucratic inertia. I dig into why it hasn’t moved, what it still wouldn’t fix (including a telling admission buried in ARRL’s own petition language), and why right now — with the FCC’s current deregulatory docket wide open — is the moment to actually push it through.
Weekly Report: July 30, 2026 — The usual: Band Conditions, Digital Radio News, Groups.io Digest.
I added a gear page on the EtherHam.com website. As my content catalog grows, I am finding it harder to come back later and find the equipment I’ve reviewed or recommended. Going forward, I’ll populate the gear page with those devices, and then link to the gear listing in my articles.
This methodology should make it easier for visitors to find the items I talk about. It will also make it easier for me to maintain links to items, because those links do change at vendor sites.
The Gear page is produced by a custom WordPress plugin, which was a lot of fun to build.
Frankly, there are already plugins that will add short, custom links to an item, but as I researched them, I found them bloated and complicated. Some require a connection to a third-party service. I also don’t like using anything that says it features “link cloaking.” Even though this is actually a common practice, it just sounds and feels wrong. My plugin is trim, does only what I want, and lives entirely on EtherHam.com. If you run a WordPress site and want the code, drop me a line. It is one PHP file, 419 lines long.
Last week, I included this item in the Short Stack:
APRSdroid 9M2PJU Mod: The Enhanced APRS Companion for Android, Built by Hams, for Hams — Hamradio.my — A ham-built mod to APRSdroid. Given the LoRa APRS iGate work on EtherHam right now, this is a natural companion piece.
Well, I installed it. If you go down this road, there are a few wrinkles to be aware of. First, you must uninstall APRSdroid if that is already on your Android device. Second, the app requires granting several permissions, but fortunately, granting permissions is as easy as pushing one button, then tapping “allow” on the ensuing popups.
Enter your call sign and your APRS passcode (just search online for “APRS passcode”) and you’re ready to go.
I’ve been using it in the pickup truck as KJ7T-5 and it is working fine.
I installed this version because it offers the ability to connect with LoRa devices if they have Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) and use a KISS TNC protocol. This means that with the right LoRa tracker, I’ll be able to connect to the other APRS network most amateurs aren’t aware of that runs on LoRa radio at 433MHz. There is a clear, step-by-step guide for this at https://aprsdroid.hamradio.my/#lora.
My 433MHz LoRa device is on its way to me from across the Pacific. I’m just very curious how this will work. One surprise for me was learning that LoRa APRS stations that are igated hit APRS-IS, so they show up on sites like aprs.fi. (Click to see my LoRa APRS station on aprs.fi.)
From Saturday’s M17 net on America’s Kansas City Wide network.
M17 is a digital voice and data protocol with hardware and software solutions.
The LinHT handheld transceiver continues to move forward. Uses GNU Radio software.
Other software that runs M17 includes DroidStar, the MSeven app, and QSO One.
The M17-KCW reflector carries primary KC Wide network traffic on module A (M17-KCW A). The B module on M17-KCW (also called “the B side”) is for M17 only; it is not connected to the A side. In the screenshot below, you can see some stations on module A and on B in the right-hand side of the reflector dashboard.
There is also a great service offered through KC Wide: seeing your live audio level. Find this at https://level.kansascitywide.com/. The interface looks like this:
There was very interesting commentary about FreeDV on HF and 2-meter sideband. Exploring FreeDV is on my list of things to dig into.
The net closed with some conversation in the net chat about radiograms. Some of the helpful links that were shared in the chat are:
Pulled from the aggregated feeds on EtherHam (etherham.com/feeds/), items from July 28–30.
Testing Airspy’s New WebSpy Web SDR Interface with an RTL-SDR — RTL-SDR Blog — A look at Airspy’s new browser-based SDR interface.
Building a $50 BOM Software Defined Radio with a HT9201 20 MHz ADC and an FX2LP USB Controller Clone — RTL-SDR Blog — Budget homebrew SDR build, bill-of-materials and all.
Radio Silence: A Native iOS App for Listening to Public KiwiSDRs — RTL-SDR Blog — A dedicated iOS client for the public KiwiSDR network.
TunerScope: A Browser App to Help Optimize HDTV Antenna Positioning with an RTL-SDR — RTL-SDR Blog — Clever repurposing of an RTL-SDR as an antenna-aiming tool.
DeepSDR Updates: Live Public Safety Incident Map with an RTL-SDR, Whisper and an LLM — RTL-SDR Blog — RTL-SDR plus Whisper transcription plus an LLM, mapped live. The standout item this week.
H-Mode: An Open HF Digital Mode That Turns Errors Into Ionospheric Measurements — Hamradio.my — A new open digital mode that uses decode errors themselves as ionospheric data.
Someone Turned a Sony PSP Into an RTTY Encoder — Hamradio.my — Exactly what it sounds like, and a fun homebrew read.
5D Web Programmer: A Free, In-Browser Codeplug Editor for the Yaesu FT-5D — Hamradio.my — Open-source, browser-based codeplug editing — no vendor software required.
RTI French Service Announces August 2026 Shortwave Broadcasts to Europe and North Africa — The SWLing Post — Fresh broadcast schedule for shortwave listeners.
Japan Times: The Uncertain Future of Shiokaze’s Shortwave Broadcasts — The SWLing Post — A look at the funding and future of the Shiokaze shortwave service.
Carlos’ Illustrated Radio Listening Report and Recording of Multiple Stations (July 21–28, 2026) — The SWLing Post — A week’s worth of DX catches with recordings.
HRWB 268 – Diversity Reception with Dave AB7E — Ham Radio Workbench — Podcast episode on diversity reception techniques.
Ham Radio and the Possibility of Internet Over Ham Radio — Amateur Radio Today — A think piece on running internet traffic over ham bands.
Two Big Store Updates: Ship with DHL or UPS, and Taking PayPal Payments — TAPR — Practical update from the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio store.
Amazon Accidentally Spent $1.8 Million Using Claude for Menial Coding Task, Went 860% Over Budget — Tom’s Hardware — A cautionary tale on agentic AI cost management.
These 3 Raspberry Pi Projects Solve Real Problems — and One Brings Back Cassette Nostalgia — How-To Geek — Relevant to anyone running Pi-based nodes or hotspots.
PSA: Your Watch Band May Be Messing With Your Laptop — Tom’s Hardware — Magnetic clasps triggering laptop lid sensors — a weird, easy-to-miss gotcha.
Plumbing, part 3. Get a dehumidifier, the plumber said, so I did. And I went low cost:
Dehumidifiers for Home, 1000 Sq.Ft Dehumidifier with 95oz Water Tank, Quiet Dehumidifier for Basement Bathroom Bedroom with 7-Color Ambient Light & Auto Shut Off, Sliver (this is an affiliate link)
The device has been pulling about a cup-and-a-half of water out of the air daily. It’s not silent — the fan noise is like white noise in the background, not really unpleasant at all. It remains on during my Zoom calls without disturbing me or the people on the call. The good-sized water tank and the automatic shutoff were key factors in my choice.
And the new moisture meter did arrive:
Klein Tools ET140 Pinless Moisture Meter for Non-Destructive Moisture Detection in Drywall, Wood, and Masonry; Detects up to 3/4-Inch Below Surface (this is an affiliate link)
Since I’m trying to sense moisture underneath the old linoleum flooring, I’m using the drywall setting. I don’t get exact/true measurements this way, but I do get relative measurements by comparing a known dry area against a suspected damp area. A week ago, the areas affected by the leak were about 10% higher moisture than the dry areas. As of today, measurements in the damp spots show about 6% more moisture. Meanwhile, the dehumidifier continues to pull moisture out. I’m guessing I’ll be ready to try the heat gun in about a week. I’m hoping this will let me flatten the tiles, and if I’m really lucky, the existing mastic will re-adhere to those lifted edges.
And with that, it’s time to say 73 and send my best wishes to you for a great radio-focused week ahead!
Remember to touch a radio every day!
