So I went and did it.

Freshly minted General class Amateur Radio license holder here. I’m a ham! And man, there is so much to learn. So I guess I’ll learn out loud on the blog.

There’s a ton of equipment out there, to do so many things, at an astonishingly broad spectrum of price points. What really inspires me, though, isn’t the fancy stuff. It’s what people are pulling off with homebrew radios and antennas, free/open software, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, that new blue pill thing I want to check out, and other cheap little gizmos you can get shipped straight from China for the price of a breakfast sandwich.

I want to go to there Yes, may I please speak to pizza?

Sure, I’ll go ahead and get a nice solid Yaesu or Icom HF rig to anchor my shack. But I want to have a go with the $59 BITX40 too. And I don’t want to spend hundreds (or thousands!) of dollars on antennas when they’re basically just a few wires and a bit of math. I don’t want to spend $300+ on a standing wave analyzer when people are building them out of parts I have on hand anyway (well, save for that one $9 frequency synthesizer). I don’t want to buy the $4000 radio with the fancy waterfall display when the cool kids are rendering waterfalls in software with a $20 circuit connecting the computer to the receiver. The true spirit of ham radio is learning from others, making things yourself, and spreading the knowledge. And that just happens to fit nicely with two of my other favorite pastimes, which are 1) doing cool stuff with computers, and 2) not spending money.

This promises to be a fascinating journey. Wish me luck.

73 @ki7tns