I found a message from N0LSR in my junk mail folder yesterday, and it was important. It’s about the failing Clear Sky Institute server. If you are an Inovato or N0LSR HamClock customer, “all users must switch to the new OHB (Open HamClock Backend) to ensure continued updates and reliable operation.” Find more information on the N0LSR home page.

There’s a quick way to tell if you are on the correct server: “If you are currently on any version below 4.26 and do not get the upgrade offered to 4.27 then you are on the wrong backend server.”

Once upgraded, the version will say 4.27 and you’ll see an envelope just below the version number. Click on the envelope icon for a status message.

1. QRV: Are You Ready?

It may seem as if there is little radio content in this issue, but that’s because the bulk of my radio work landed on EtherHam.com this week. Specifically, I took several days to develop a detailed hands-on look at my new Talk2Me push-to-talk over cellular radio. The pointer for that is below in the New on EtherHam section. If you’re interested in PoC radios, you’ll find this worth your time.

After looking at how these radios and services are marketed, how the ordering and fulfillment process actually happens from the end-user point of view, and how the radio and service function, I’ve concluded: this is not a mature market. Several companies are vying for your dollars. The actual hardware and services offered are in a state of continuous change, so I think it is very difficult for a vendor to keep up with onboarding information, documentation, and even fulfillment steps. This shouldn’t dissuade you from entering this space if you are interested in PoC radio, but do be prepared for a rockier process, from start to finish, than you may be used to experiencing with mainstream amateur radio products. Why would you do this? Because PoC radios can offer an unprecedented level of connectivity and convenience.

2. New on EtherHam

• Push-to-Talk Over Cellular: Hands-On with a Modern PoC Radio — Part 3 in a series. My radio arrived with no instructions. I learned how to use it by pushing every button and chasing every menu. Thirty minutes to enter a WiFi password. An SOS mode hiding behind the flashlight button. A Bluetooth pairing that is not obvious how to undo. And when I finally found the official manual online, it described a radio with no WiFi and no Bluetooth — not the radio I bought. The device itself works, and it puts Kansas City Wide in my pocket, at home on my network and while I’m on the road. Should you buy it? Overall, I’m happy with the device and the service.

• Building a LoRa APRS iGate/Digipeater — Part 1: Why, What, and How — I already run conventional VHF APRS from the lake house, so when I heard about LoRa APRS, I wanted to see what it would take to get a station on the air. (LoRa APRS is a newer parallel network built on chirp spread-spectrum instead of classic AFSK packet.) When I checked the LoRa APRS live map, I found exactly one LoRa APRS station in the whole area, and it hadn’t heard anything over RF in over two months. Here’s how I turned a LilyGo T-Deck Plus into KJ7T-2 — a live 433.775 MHz iGate and digipeater — including recovering from installing the wrong firmware and the hidden BOOT button.

• Weekly Report: July 23, 2026 — Band Conditions, Digital Radio News, Groups.io Digest.

3. New on the Bench

MeshCore Repeater — I bought a MeshCore repeater from an Etsy seller. It is solar-powered with a single 18650 battery inside to keep it running in the dark times. I am halfway between two other MeshCore devices, each about 15 miles away. You can explore the worldwide MeshCore map at https://map.meshcore.io. In the screenshot below, I’ve placed a Random Wire sticker on my location. You can see I have stations to the southwest and to the northeast.

I’ve magnetically attached the repeater to the steel chimney cap.

Even though my device is up above the roofline, I’m on a lake, and that means I occupy a topographic low. I do have a 915MHz mag-mount antenna coming that I hope will extend the reach of this device, but I’m not optimistic. Still, it’s an interesting device and system to explore.

T-Deck Plus — This LilyGo device will probably arrive the day after this Random Wire issue publishes. This is a 915MHz device that I plan to flash with MeshCore firmware so I can talk to my repeater and perhaps get that repeater onto the MeshCore map. If MeshCore doesn’t work out, I can flash it with Meshtastic. I might also try a T-Echo Tracker on 915MHz, too.

T-Echo Tracker — This is a second T-Echo, but this one is configured for 433MHz. It should connect to my LoRa APRS igate/digipeater running as KJ7T-2. I want to use the T-Echo to see how far KJ7T-2 will reach.

APRS testing — I’ve been monitoring APRS on APRSdroid, aprs.fi, and my mobile radio, wanting to see if those were picking up my KJ7T LightAPRS Gateway device…and they are. What surprised me was that my LoRa APRS box, running as KJ7T-2, is also picked up by aprs.fi.

I also see that my internal battery voltage on the LightAPRS Gateway device has come up from the 4.5V range to nearly 4.7V. That’s because I changed the 1A wall charger to a 2A device.

4. Website: EtherHam CSS Cleanup with Claude

This may only be of interest to other webmasters. If you don’t manage a website, read this as: Claude can help you handle some mundane tasks…and feel free to skip it if the idea of cleaning up CSS code makes your eyes cross!

When I was first setting up EtherHam.com, I chose to use WordPress as the content management system. I’ve been working with WordPress for years. While it is a bit bloated for my needs, I know it inside and out. Just like using a favorite radio, there is a certain comfort in that.

I worked my way through several block themes, each requiring some Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) customization. Many fragments got orphaned along the way — leftover CSS doing nothing but cluttering the file.

I'd read that Claude could help manage a WordPress site, but hadn't trusted it enough to try. This week, I decided to give it a try. First, I backed up the entire site, including making a copy of the CSS file I was about to change. Then I asked Claude for help.

I installed the Claude in Chrome extension when prompted, and after that, Claude had direct access to what I had open in the browser. This process worked well. We cleaned up the CSS settings, and along the way, I identified a few plugins that I had tried but never used, so those got removed.

Since I was on a roll, I asked Claude for help making formatting consistent between the home page, sub pages, and posts. In just a few minutes, we aligned formatting in these different views.

I posted the exact CSS file Claude helped me clean up on EtherHam, if you’re interested. It is nicely organized and well commented.

If you’re curious, you can download a copy as a text file.

Bottom line: EtherHam.com looks fine and the styling is cleaned up and consistent throughout the site.

5. Vehicle Super Starter: Why I Didn’t Buy It

This isn’t amateur radio, but it could intersect with licensed operators if they run a mobile radio in their rig.

What is this about? I thought about buying a super capacitor for my truck. The sales messaging I’ve been seeing seemed compelling and I find the concept quite clever, so I gave it more than a cursory look.

Ancel sells a device called the Super Starter — a permanently installed super capacitor that wires into your battery terminals and sits under the hood, taking over most of the cranking load every time you start the engine. The pitch is straightforward: your battery stops absorbing the punishing current spike of a cold start, wear and tear drops, and the battery lasts longer. No cables, no remembering to charge a separate pack, no getting out of the truck. Connect it once, forget it exists, and let it quietly do its job for years.

I’ve had dying and weak vehicle batteries, so I really like the concept. I like anything that takes a known failure mode — batteries dying at the worst possible moment — and tries to engineer it away rather than just selling you a booster with a flashlight and jumper cables.

But a few things stopped me before I clicked buy. First, the fit-to-cost problem: the base model is rated for engines up to 3.0 liters, and my Ridgeline runs a 3.5L V6. The unit that actually matches my truck runs closer to $220 than the $150 headline price on the smaller model — a detail that’s easy to miss if you’re moving fast.

Second, the marketing language has a familiar look to it. If you’ve watched the push-to-talk-over-cellular space the way I have, you’ve seen this pattern before: a genuinely interesting piece of engineering wrapped in urgency — limited-time pricing, breathless “why didn’t this exist sooner” copy, glowing coverage that reads like it was written by someone with an affiliate link. None of that makes the underlying tech bad. But it’s usually a sign the vendor wants you to make the purchase decision before you’ve had time to ask the boring questions, like whether the battery-life claims hold up after a real winter under the hood. This product launched this year. There’s no multi-year data available yet, independent or otherwise.

However, there is a review published by Car and Driver that touches on the utility of the device for cold winter vehicle starts. It sounds solid, and it is a real-world, hands-on kind of review. If you’re interested in this tech, this is worth a read: This Clever Supercapacitor Accessory Is a Smart Fix for Cold Car Starts.

Third, and this is the part that’s specific to the Random Wire audience: if you’ve got a mobile rig hardwired into your vehicle’s electrical system, this device is doing something to your crank and start-up voltage profile that nobody’s characterized yet. It’s not a fuse-blowing concern in the classic sense — the Super Starter probably doesn’t add current through your radio’s own power leads, so an overcurrent trip on that circuit isn’t the likely failure mode. The more concerning question is voltage transients on the 12V bus itself. During the crank event, the capacitor is absorbing most of the starter’s draw and then handing off to the battery and alternator; right after start, it’s pulling current back from the alternator to refill itself. Either transition could produce a brief dip or overshoot on the bus that a normally-fed rig wouldn’t otherwise see — and mobile radios are already notoriously sensitive to exactly that kind of thing, which is why so many of us add extra transient suppression to a hardwired install in the first place. I haven’t found research measuring the 12V bus with and without one of these installed, from Ancel or anyone independent. Until someone runs that test, I wouldn’t want it anywhere near several hundred dollars of mobile radio gear.

Fourth, and the part that actually killed it for me: the thing only helps the vehicle it’s bolted to. I have kids with vehicles in various states of mechanical health, and I’m the guy who often gets the call when one of them won’t start. A device clamped to my own battery terminals is no use to them. This means I’d still need to carry a portable lithium booster in the truck regardless of whether I installed the Super Starter. And if I’m already carrying a booster that covers every situation the Super Starter covers plus the ones it doesn’t, the case for spending another $220 on a single-purpose, single-vehicle install gets thin fast.

So here’s where I landed: it’s a legitimately clever idea, and I like the concept. If you’ve got a vehicle that sits for long stretches, hauls a heavy accessory load, or otherwise chews through batteries, I understand the appeal. But for a daily-driven rig with a battery in decent shape, and a household where “helpful” means being able to jump anyone’s vehicle, not just your own, a $60 portable booster under the seat does more for less money — and doesn’t ask you to trust a new product category on faith. I’ll keep an eye on this space. If the independent, multi-season reviews start showing up and the numbers hold, I may revisit it. For now, my jumper cables and a charged lithium pack are in the truck.

6. Short Stack from the Interwebs

Pulled from the aggregated feeds on EtherHam (etherham.com/feeds/), items from July 20–23.

Antennas

• The Crown Antenna: A Wire Loop That Hugs the Roof and Works the World — Hamradio.my — A roof-hugging wire loop design for HF. Worth a look if you’re antenna-restricted.

• Part 2 of… Antenna solve one problem to only create another — Amateur Radio Weekly — the classic antenna-tinkering trap: fix one issue, discover a new one. Relatable.

Propagation & Science

• HamSCI Ray Tracing Working Group — HAMSCI.org — HamSCI’s group working on ray-tracing tools for ionospheric propagation modeling.

• The ARRL Solar Update — ARRL News — Latest solar/propagation conditions rundown.

Satellites

• UmKA-1 (RS40S) Satellite to Transmit SSTV, Audio Clips — Amateur Radio Daily — New satellite planning SSTV and audio transmissions — worth tracking if you’re into satellite work.

APRS & Digital

• 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.

DIY / Gadgets

• Flash a $2 Pi-hole From Your Browser: The 9M2PJU ESP32-C3 AdBlocker — Hamradio.my — Browser-flashable ad-blocker on a $2 ESP32-C3. Not radio, but exactly the kind of cheap-hardware hack that fits the workbench.

History & Culture

• How Amateur Radio Built the Indonesian Internet: PaguyubanNet, Packet Radio and the Pioneers of 1986–1994 — Hamradio.my — Deep history on how ham packet radio bootstrapped Indonesia’s early internet. Genuinely excellent long-read, easily the standout item this week — from both the curated and mega feeds.

Reference

• DXing Techniques for Amateur Radio: A Complete Guide to Working the World — Amateur Radio Today — Solid DXing primer, good bookmark-and-share material.

Community / Silent Keys

• DXer and DXpeditioner Kan Mizoguchi, JA1BK, Silent Key — ARRL News —Passing of a notable DXpeditioner.

Also Noted

• San Diego Section of IEEE Invited Talk Intersects ORI’s Antenna Work — Open Research Institute

• VHF for Parks On The Air? — Amateur Radio Weekly

• The W9IMS Brickyard 400 Special Event: Third Time’s a Certificate — The SWLing Post

• Records with Soul and a WAVE — The SWLing Post

7. Ported Scripts to My Proxmox Server

This week, I moved a few scripts to my Proxmox box. The backstory? The Raspberry Pi where those scripts lived…died. And it wasn’t just any Pi — it was the one that handled my home lab tracker and processed the Digital Radio News Gatherer script every week.

I had been planning to move those scripts to my Proxmox server — someday — so the failure of the Pi changed that to right now. Fortunately, I was keeping regular backups of the scripts and data on a USB thumbdrive, in ext4 format. Proxmox can read ext4, so my backups provided the smoothest way to transfer scripts, settings, and data to Proxmox containers.

The Pi’s death wasn’t quiet. First it was a service crash-looping on the lab tracker. It turned out a routine apt autoremove had quietly pulled Flask out from under a process that had been running fine for weeks, and nobody noticed until the next reboot forced it to reload a dependency that was no longer there. In other words, it was already broken, I just didn’t know it.

Then the real trouble started: the case ran hot, SSH sessions began dropping mid-command, and one by one, services stopped responding. Cockpit, gone. Docker, gone. The web apps stayed technically alive but started throwing I/O errors the moment they tried to touch the disk. That’s the signature of a filesystem giving up, not just a CPU getting warm. A fan and a reboot bought some time, but a few hours later it came back worse — even basic commands like tail and sudo started failing. The NVMe drive, a budget no-name unit, may well be on its way out…or is possibly underpowered by the HAT. Pi 5 NVMe bases are known to be stingy on current under sustained load, which can look exactly like a failing drive without one actually being bad.

By the time I went to grab the backup drive, every way I had of reaching the Pi remotely had stopped working — the usual command-line connection, the web-based control panel, even the official remote-access tool. I pulled the thumbdrive and plugged it into my Proxmox box. After that, recovery was almost anticlimactic: I could read straight from the drive without disturbing anything, and there sat every night’s backup, the program and its database both untouched. From there, I built a new home on the Proxmox server: a small, self-contained slice of the machine, running its own private copy of the software it depends on instead of sharing whatever happens to be installed system-wide. That last part matters more than it sounds like it should — it’s the difference between a routine cleanup silently breaking your service, and your service carrying its own dependencies with it, immune to whatever else happens on the machine.

The Digital Radio News Gatherer had its own separate gremlin — a Groq API key that looked fine in its config file but wasn’t actually making it into the running process, because the cron job launching it never sourced the environment file, and even after fixing that, the file itself was missing an export in front of the key. Two small, easy-to-miss mistakes stacked on top of each other, neither one loud enough to point straight at the cause. That is sorted now, and worth remembering for anyone else running scripts out of cron with secrets tucked into a separate file.

These are lessons for anyone running similar infrastructure off a Pi — and I know plenty of you are: back up more than just your data. A solid backup process is what saved me here, not a database export. (All of my Proxmox containers are backed up weekly to an external target.) And if you can move a service that matters onto something with real redundancy, consider doing that before the hardware makes the decision for you.

8. Open Notebook on Proxmox Server

I’m starting to play with an open source project called Open Notebook. So far, it looks interesting and seems to run fine on my Proxmox server. I’m going to use it for capturing meeting agendas and notes, and then see if that kind of content proves useful.

I installed it several weeks ago and already an update was waiting. Updating it was very easy — much easier than I expected. It runs in a Docker container, so just three commands took care of the version upgrade:

docker compose down
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d

Docker Compose makes it pretty painless — three commands and your data stays untouched since it lives in the mounted volume, not in the container. I wish all updates were so easy!

9. QRT: End Transmission

Plumbing, part 2. We’re still dealing with the plumbing leak I reported last week. We now have a new faucet that works well. I had to add a plug to the unused hole in the sink top, but that was not much money and only a quick trip to Ace Hardware. The continuing issue is the water that seeped under the kitchen floor tiles. That lifted several tiles along the edges. I’ve been running a fan and a dehumidifier constantly since then to try and dry the moisture out from under the floor. A new moisture meter is arriving this week: pinless, so I can take relative measurements, comparing dry, unaffected spots with the parts that did receive some seepage. I need to make sure that wood won’t grow mold when I fix some of those tiles.

Frustrated with bad UI. I’m trying to configure an events plugin for my work website, and the user interface is full of labels that don’t mean what they say. Example: “configure calendar” is actually a shortcode generator. Or two labels that sound identical, one above the other. A “configure” link hiding under the “other data” label. An unlabeled, bright orange button in the usual “submit” position with an arrow on it…that doesn’t appear to actually do anything. If you couldn’t tell, I really, really don’t like poorly designed UIs!

And that’s enough to close Random Wire 192. I hope you had a productive, interesting radio week.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

1. QRV: Are You Ready?

I started a series on DMR radio this week, because my coverage of DMR has been a bit light. Why? Because I don’t really understand it. The best way to learn DMR is to use it, and I find that organizing what I’m learning and writing about it really helps to cement that knowledge in my mind.

I fixed a bug in my AllStar node running on an Arduino UNO Q board. It is reliable again. Speaking of reliability, I also implemented a backup routine for one of my primary AllStar nodes that is driven by a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client PC.

There are a few write-ups about artificial intelligence in Random Wire 191. I had an interesting experience with two different models in Claude. I also gave Hermes Agent a try and found it is too powerful and complex for what I need, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t right for you.

Following up on my deep dive into the push-to-talk over cellular space, I ordered a PoC radio. This is a leap of faith. I want to experience what a typical buyer experiences, and I’m hopeful the new radio will be fun to use. This week I touch on some purchasing friction points. Next week I should have the radio in hand.

I learned about CascadiaMesh this week…and it is interesting enough that I ordered a solar-powered mesh device to go on the roof. Fingers crossed it works well.

I signed up for QSO One and tested it for a few days. It has great promise, but right now, the UI is still a little rough around the edges, at least in my experience.

And I saw a strange glitch in my APRSdroid display. It was odd enough that I did some research on it and documented it in a bug report filed on GitHub.

I also tried a speaker-mic on the Uniwa F400 smartphone with DVSwitch and DroidStar installed. Did it work? Yes as a remote speaker, no as a microphone. I’ll be exploring button mapping as a way to try to get it working with that platform.

That’s Random Wire 191 in a nutshell. I hope you enjoy reading about these amateur radio and technology topics this week. I’m always open to learning and trying new things, so please do send your ideas and suggestions to me!

2. Thank You

I want to thank all the innovators and all the folks who form the solid backbone of our hobby. Last week, I wrote a brief piece about crossing the chasm, in the context of adopting amateur radio technology.

This week, I’m leaning in on this concept. I usually occupy the “early market” part of the curve — innovators and early adopters. Trying new things, or things new to me, is what I enjoy most. The makers, designers, builders, and coders keep the magic alive in our hobby. I doubt we’ve ever seen as much innovation and creativity in amateur radio as we’re experiencing now.

But people like me are actually a small percentage of the hobby, compared to the much larger group: the “mainstream market” folks. The early majority, late majority, and laggards (not my choice of term!) form the spine that holds up amateur radio, year in and year out. They buy the gear that keeps major players in the game, and that benefits all of us.

The “early market” folks are one side of the amateur radio coin; the “mainstream market” folks are the other. We can’t have one without the other — both are needed to keep the hobby healthy and vibrant.

Thank you to the innovators and early adopters. Thank you to the larger group that keeps the hobby together. No matter which side of the coin you prefer, you’re important to all of us.

3. New on EtherHam

Some fun radio-related topics this week.

• Introduction to DMR: The Four Wheels on the Car — This is Part 1 in a short series on DMR, written for those of us who find DMR, well, daunting. DMR asks new users to understand codeplugs, timeslots, talkgroups, and networks before they’ve even keyed the mic — and most guides bury that in jargon before you get near your first contact. This piece cuts through it with one idea: DMR is like a car, and those four concepts are its four wheels. Get all four turning and you’re on the air; skip one, and you’re not going anywhere. Part 1 of Tommy’s Guide to DMR builds that mental model — no gear list yet, no codeplug, just the four ideas you need before any of the rest makes sense.

• AllStar on Arduino UNO Q: Part 2 (The Bug That Killed My Node…Until I Fixed It) — If your UNO Q AllStar node runs for hours and then drops dead — heartbeat LED red, lsusb empty, nothing but a full power cycle bringing it back — the culprit is a documented bug that silently flips the board’s USB-C port out of host mode. The fix is a one-line command, made permanent with a small systemd service, and it’s all laid out in Part 2. The QNode is now rock solid, and yours can be too. Part 1 is at How to Run AllStar on the Arduino UNO Q.

• Backing Up Your AllStar Node: Why I Do It Even Though “eMMC Never Fails” — Every AllStarLink node builder has an opinion on whether the storage in their node will ever fail — and one popular take is that the eMMC in a Dell Wyse 3040 thin client basically never does. That might even be true. But I learned decades ago, the hard way, what it feels like to lose weeks of irreplaceable work to a single bad disk, and I’ve never wanted to relearn that lesson on a node that also connects to my ham phone. Here’s why I back up my node anyway, what eMMC actually gets right (and wrong) compared to microSD, the one AllScan file I almost forgot to include, and a free, MIT-licensed script you can use so a dead drive is a shrug instead of a crisis.

• Hardening SSH Access to Your AllStarLink Node: Moving Beyond Port 22 — Your AllStarLink node isn’t just a simple appliance — you’re running an unattended Debian server with a direct line to your radio and your home network, and automated bots are scanning for it right now. A compromised node isn’t just an inconvenience: it can mean unauthorized transmissions attributed to your callsign, or a foothold into every other device on your LAN. This walkthrough shows how to close a common gap in an afternoon — moving off the default SSH port, adding real rate-limiting, and locking down Fail2Ban correctly on Debian, including the exact reason it silently fails for a lot of people.

• Push-to-Talk Over Cellular: The Actual Buying Experience — I ordered a PoC radio from Talk2Me USA on July 11, expecting to click “buy” and wait for a box. Instead, the next four days were an inbox: a $15 billing mix-up that was later reversed, a new Terms of Service that arrived the day after I paid, and login credentials for three separate radio networks — before the hardware itself had even shipped. The ad copy sells “buy now.” The actual experience is “buy now, then wait” — and it turns out most of what a buyer needs to know happens in that gap, not at checkout.

4. Claude AI: An Hour with Sonnet, Ten Minutes with Fable

I reported last week that the default engine on Claude had changed from Opus to Sonnet. I also reported that Fable had been released, then blocked, and then made available again. I got a chance to use the high-powered Fable engine this week, and therein lies a story.

This relates to the UNO Q item directly above in this newsletter. As I tried to figure out what was going on with my Arduino UNO Q-powered AllStar node, I eventually turned to Claude for some help. Using the default Sonnet engine, we went round and round for an hour. It got to the point where I would tell Claude: no, we’ve tried that twice already, I do not want to repeat that process…and Claude would push it forward anyway.

Eventually, I asked for a written summary of that conversation, closed the thread, and opened a new one with Fable as the engine. Ten minutes. That’s what it took to do the proper research and lead me to a solution that worked.

To be fair, this comparison isn't perfectly clean. It's tempting to blame Sonnet for an hour of churning — but that churning is what produced the diagnostic evidence, including the exact kernel log signature of the failure, that let Fable's first web search land directly on a known bug report. A fresh session armed with documented dead ends gave Fable a real head start.

There’s a workflow lesson here that applies no matter which AI you use: when a session starts going in circles, ask for a written handoff summary, close the thread, and start fresh. That technique rescued this project as much as the model swap did.

Honestly, Opus was a capable engine. I’m not particularly pleased with Sonnet, at least for sleuthing code and hardware problems. Fable burns through credits faster, but I was very pleased with how thoroughly and surgically it developed a solution. As noted, though, the work I did with Sonnet gave Fable a leg up as we reached the finish line.

5. Hermes Agent: Complex and Powerful

Some weeks ago, I set up an instance of Hermes Agent on my home server. I started by powering the reasoning side with Grok, but it burned through my credits faster than expected, so I downscaled to Gemini (free), which worked well.

Hermes Agent is an open-source AI agent framework, and “agent” is the operative word — it’s not a chat window, it’s a system meant to run unattended and act on your behalf. It can execute multi-step tasks autonomously across your terminal, your IDE, and more than ten messaging platforms (Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, Signal, email). It remembers things across sessions — your preferences, your environment, lessons learned — and it can save reusable procedures as “skills” so it gets better at your specific workflows over time. You can point it at almost any LLM provider (OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, local models) and swap between them mid-workflow, run multiple isolated instances with their own memory and config, and extend it with plugins, custom tools, webhooks, and cron jobs. On paper, it can handle coding and debugging, research, system administration, data analysis, content creation, and even home automation.

That list alone tells you something: this isn’t a “download an app and go” tool. Getting it running means configuration files, API quotas, provider swaps, and troubleshooting that assumes you’re comfortable poking around under the hood.

I spent a couple of days putting it through its paces — switching models, testing its WordPress and GitHub integrations, watching how it handles tool-calling. It’s genuinely capable, and I came away with real respect for what it can do. I also hit real friction: a crashed gateway, a free-tier quota that ran out faster than expected, and copy-paste quirks that took some digging to sort out.

Here’s my takeaway. If you have a specific need for an autonomous, always-on agent — something that runs unattended, chains multiple tools together, or watches your systems continuously — Hermes Agent may be worth the investment of time it takes to learn. But that’s not the problem I have. I mostly want a smart assistant to review my writing, help me code, or think through a problem. For these tasks, a standard AI chat interface gets me there with a lot less overhead. Hermes is a great solution for a problem I just don’t have.

6. PoC Radio Followup: I Ordered One

I’ve had some interesting exchanges about my push-to-talk over cellular deep dive (see: Buying Push-to-Talk Over Cellular Without Getting Taken). Even though I’ve previously purchased three PoC units, those were generally low-end devices. I’ve ordered a modern unit at a higher price point that meets these criteria:

• Cellular connectivity

• Wi-Fi connectivity

• Can use the HamLink PoC app by Talk2Me

Why? Two reasons. First, I want to put myself in the shoes of a typical buyer who is trying to find the device that meets his/her needs. Second, I want a PoC device that will also let me connect to America’s Kansas City Wide Network, and HamLink PoC offers that capability. I ordered through Talk2Me specifically because it appears to be one of the leading vendors in this market space, which gave me more confidence going in than I’d have with an unknown seller.

Worth saying up front: I trusted Talk2Me enough to send them $200 for a radio I hadn't yet held, on the strength of that reputation. That's the lens for everything below. These are observations from a buyer who chose them for good reason, not grievances against a vendor I regret choosing — and precisely because I went with a name I trusted, the friction points I ran into are worth knowing for anyone buying a PoC radio, from any vendor.

So far, the buying experience is about what I expected. Details about each radio choice were hard to find. The HamLink PoC app was supposed to be free with a radio purchase — instead, I was charged for it, and later told that charge will be refunded. This kind of behavior ("it's free" but then you get charged) makes it harder to trust vendors. To be clear, these observations are necessarily about Talk2Me, since that’s who I bought from, but I have no reason to think Talk2Me is worse than other vendors in this space. If anything, the fact that friction shows up even with a leading vendor is the point: these are things any PoC buyer should watch for, regardless of who they order from.

I was pleased that for the HamLink PoC app, I was asked to provide a copy of my FCC-issued amateur radio license. That gives me confidence that app usage will be limited to licensed operators.

The radio was originally tracking to arrive Saturday, July 18, at the early end of the vendor’s 7-11 day estimate. Since then I’ve received a delay notice pushing delivery to July 20. Another friction point worth flagging for anyone shopping this category: the delay notice didn’t explain a cause, and there’s still no order-status page or tracking link that gives more detail than “delayed.”

I also received a new terms of service notice before the radio or the app were even in my hands. The timing felt odd — as though placing the order triggered it, rather than it being a routine notice sent to all customers. If it’s the latter, the coincidence is remarkable. I can’t say which it is, and I’m not accusing Talk2Me of anything here. However, a buyer in the middle of an active order is not in a great position to evaluate a new ToS agreement on its merits. That’s worth naming as its own category of friction, separate from the pricing and shipping issues above.

For a purchase already made opaque by pricing and add-on confusion, a shifting delivery date without explanation and an untimely ToS update amount to small trust deductions. None of this is disqualifying on its own, but it’s the kind of accumulated friction that shapes whether a buyer sticks with a vendor for a second purchase.

I’ll have more on this once the device arrives and I get it configured — and with a radio in hand, issue 192 will shift away from the purchasing process and focus on the device itself. Fingers crossed this is not a $200 mistake. I’m actually hopeful the device and service will prove useful and enjoyable!

7. Have You Heard of CascadiaMesh?

Thank you to subscriber Joe who brought CascadiaMesh to my attention.

CascadiaMesh is a volunteer community project (not a company or nonprofit) that's building out a regional mesh network across British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon, using solar-powered nodes for "grid-down" resilient comms. It's grown fast — over 2,300 active nodes as of today. The network runs on MeshCore, an open-source LoRa mesh protocol, and the site provides onboarding guides, device recommendations, node-building tutorials, a live map, and links to sibling regional meshes (Puget Mesh, Salish Mesh, etc.) across the US, Canada, and Europe.

My take? CascadiaMesh appears to have positive momentum. Here’s a 30-second screen recording of the live map to give you an idea of the vibrancy of the network. It is operating not just across town, but across state and provincial lines.

Important: MeshCore has its own iOS/Android app, its own web flasher (flasher.meshcore.dev), and its own config tool. A MeshCore node can't talk to a Meshtastic node — they use different protocols and encryption.

OK, color me interested. I ordered a small solar-powered node from an Etsy vendor. I’m hoping to put it up on top of the galvanized steel chimney cap which sits above the peak of the roof. Maybe there are other MeshCore nodes near me!

If MeshCore interests you, too, you should probably be aware there is a battle going on over trademarking the MeshCore name. Ultimately, I don’t think this will affect the codebase or the community, but it could result in the project getting renamed. I hope not, because MeshCore is perfectly descriptive.

8. QSO One, Part 2 — Testing

QSO One's pitch is bold: "Amateur radio, reimagined." The marketing promises a single modern client that puts AllStarLink, EchoLink, DMR, and M17 all in one app, on Windows or Android, with no node to build, no hotspot to flash, and no radio interface to wire up — twenty-five dollars and five minutes between you and being keyed up on any of it. It's framed as the client nobody else had bothered to build: a clean, cross-platform answer to IAXRpt's abandonment, DVSwitch's complexity, and the fragmented, one-app-per-mode reality most of us have been living with for years.

If this is real, it will have real value for radio amateurs. So I downloaded the QSO One app and installed it on my Windows laptop. This is what I like doing: poke at something to make sure it lives up to its billing. I’ll have a full write-up on this in the near future because the experience was a bit rocky. Essentially, the UI doesn’t really lead you through how to get set up and connected. I spent quite a bit of time poking around, trying to figure things out.

But once I got it connected with my AllStar node 588418, it worked well. The audio had a bit of choppiness to it but I suspect that is my network, not the app. To test that, I shut down QSO One and used the venerable iaxRpt app to connect to my node, and heard exactly the same choppy audio.

I was not successful at getting M17 to connect. It did find my reflector M17-PNW but then errored out. This appears tied to a connection-handoff bug in the app rather than something wrong with M17.

At this point, I would describe QSO One as a very good "built from the ground up" new app that is still rough around the edges, in active development, and shows promise. This one is definitely worth watching.

9. Chasing a Weird APRSdroid Display Glitch

A few weeks ago I noticed something odd in APRSdroid’s Hub view on my Android smartphone: my mobile’s SSID was showing up as “KJ7T-9_1” instead of “KJ7T-9.” At first I assumed I’d fat-fingered something on the radio, so I changed the SSID to -11. Same thing happened — “KJ7T-11_1.” Then I saw Jeff’s portable, W7NEE-9, and it had its own additional underscore and number: “_3.” Whatever this was, it wasn’t just me, and it clearly wasn’t an SSID problem, since the SSID itself was displaying correctly in the title. The mystery character was showing up as a second line, like a comment.

The next step was to stop guessing and go look at the actual data. Pulling the raw packets for KJ7T-9 from aprs.fi’s raw packet view showed the underscore-digit baked right into the transmitted Mic-E packet. APRSdroid was not inventing this — it was real. And critically, aprs.fi wasn’t displaying it as a comment at all. That told me the “_1” was actual data that one piece of software was interpreting correctly and another wasn’t.

It turns out this is a documented part of the Mic-E spec. Bob Bruninga WB4APR (SK) produced a reference table of Mic-E “device identifier” bytes — a two-character suffix that radios append to the end of the Mic-E info field to identify themselves, positioned right after the base-91 altitude data. Per that table, “_1” decodes to a Yaesu FTM-300D and “_3” decodes to a Yaesu FT5D. The spec is explicit that receiving software should recognize these bytes and strip them from the displayed text (or use them to show the radio model) rather than showing them as if they were part of a comment. aprs.fi does this correctly. APRSdroid, at least as of the current release on my phone, doesn’t.

Rather than just grumbling about it, I filed a bug report on APRSdroid’s GitHub page. I made sure to include the actual raw packet as evidence, a link to the spec document that defines the correct behavior, a clear statement of what I observed versus what should happen, and a specific suggested fix. I also included my app version and Android version, since that’s the first thing any maintainer will ask for anyway.

I’d encourage anyone who runs into a quirk like this in ham radio software to consider doing the same thing. Many of these tools — APRSdroid included — are maintained by one or two volunteers in their spare time, often for free, and often for years. A report that says “this looks broken” is easy to ignore. A report with raw data, a spec citation, and a proposed fix is something a maintainer can act on in five minutes instead of an hour. It also means the next ham who hits the same weirdness can search the issue tracker and find an answer instead of struggling to figure out a diagnosis from scratch. Bug reports help the maintainer, but they also help the community.

10. Speaker-Mic for Uniwa F400 Phone

Will it work? That has been on my mind since I ordered this through Amazon (this is an affiliate link):

Portbale Microphone for UNIWA F400 and Anysecu W400 4G Network Radio

(Yes, portable is misspelled. That’s the way it is listed.)

It certainly makes the smartphone look more like a radio, but will it work? It arrived, I attached it, and it works well as a remote speaker. However, the push-to-talk button works the same as the PTT on the phone itself, which is to say it doesn’t work with DVSwitch Mobile or DroidStar. I didn’t really expect it to, but I also haven’t explored button mapping apps to see if I can get the PTT to work with one (or both) of those apps.

Two resources I’ll be exploring to try to get the PTT functioning the way I want.

• Button Mapper: Remap your keys (by developer flar2) — the most established option, free, no root required for most actions, works via Android’s accessibility framework. Nearly 11,000 reviews on Google Play. Handles volume keys, camera buttons, headset buttons, and “custom buttons” (which is the category a PTT accessory would likely fall into). Find it in the Google Play Store.

• Key Mapper (open source, by sds100) — more technical/granular option, popular in the XDA/hobbyist crowd. Supports multi-key combos and sequences, and unlike Button Mapper it’s fully open source if your readers want to see exactly what it’s doing under the hood before granting accessibility permissions — which is a reasonable thing for a security-conscious ham audience to want. Find it on GitHub.

Note that both of these apps rely on Android’s accessibility service to intercept the keypress. Also, remapping only helps if the target app already accepts input from some other bound key (like volume-down) that these tools can redirect the PTT press to. It’s a promising rabbit hole, not a guaranteed fix.

11. What’s On The Bench

• Antenna Launcher — I still have my pneumatic antenna launcher to complete. The wiring diagram for the electrical trigger was not clear, so I requested (and received) additional information from the vendor. But that was months ago, so I need to review it all again before I commence with the last phase of soldering. Considering that my end-fed halfwave wire fell out of the tall Douglas fir tree, completing the launcher has become more urgent.

• UHF/VHF dipole — A small dipole antenna is coming from a vendor in Oregon. I’ll strap this to a telescoping painter pole to get my LightAPRS Gateway antenna out of the garage and higher in the air. That should improve performance considerably.

• T-Beam ordered — I plan to set up an APRS-over-LoRa digipeater on 70 cm. This is different than normal APRS on UHF because LoRa uses spread spectrum radio — the two types of APRS on UHF are not compatible. Maybe I’ll discover a few more people are doing this; I hope so. The device was shipped on July 16 and may arrive in time for Random Wire 192.

12. Recipes for Radios

I had a problem with APRS on my Yaesu FTM-300DR mobile radio. VFO B is set to use SmartBeaconing while I’m mobile…but it stopped working right after I made a backup copy of the frequencies and settings to a microSD card. Thinking about it, I realized I must’ve fumble-fingered a setting while trying to remember how to write a copy of the radio to the card. It’s also possible that a voltage spike scrambled some settings.

Short version: I got it working again. SmartBeaconing had been turned off and the beacon interval was set to manual. Enabling SmartBeaconing and setting the interval to Smart solved the problem, as shown in the track below for KJ7T-9:

You can tell it is using SmartBeaconing because the dots are farther apart on the lengths of road with higher speed limits. Closer to town and in town, at lower speeds, the dots are closer together. (The other thing I’m happy to see is at the end of this track when I returned home, my own KJ7T digipeater picked up my beacon.)

The takeaway: I’m again reminded of the value of recipe cards. In the IT space, we call the step-by-step instructions to accomplish tasks not done very often by a special term: runbooks. However, I think of them as recipe cards. Even though I know some of my mother’s favorite recipes by heart, I always refer to the old recipe card while I’m making one of those dishes. The same kind of system — a recipe card for a particular configuration you want to work right every time — also works for your radios.

If keeping a notebook or computer file of particular steps seems too onerous, try some 3x5 cards contained in one group with a rubber band. This system does not need batteries or an internet connection.

For important settings you rarely change — or perhaps as memories fade with time — recipe cards can save you from an immense amount of frustration.

13. Short Stack

Community

• Join Hams Over Video Conference 24/7 — What is this? It’s a Jitsi Meet server hosted by the same ham who runs AmateurWire (Roger Radcliff KE8LCM), and it appears he has a partner in this (Murray Green K3BEQ). I tested it in a browser on my laptop and in the Jitsi app on my Android phone, and both work fine. Ham radio is about connecting with others, and this service helps you do that.

Podcasts

• HRWB 267 - Designing The Pebble Radio — “In this episode we meet Becky Spiceland N4BKY, Mike Spiceland N4FFF and Barb Asuroglu WB2CBA the amateur radio operators behind the Pebble radio project.”

• Solder Smoke episode 265 is available — listen to it or watch it on YouTube.

APRS & Digital

• aprs.world — “APRS World is a modern, open-source client for the global APRS-IS amateur radio network.” Accessible through a web browser and has an Android app.

• DroidStar 9M2PJU Mod — I installed this customized build of DroidStar on my Android phone and found it works fine. I tested it on YSF, M17, and IAX. For those of us who have been waiting for DroidStar connections over IAX to be fixed, in this build, it works!

• Learn About FlexRadio’s Aurora Transceiver from the Team that Developed It (Video) — “A few months before Hamvention, DX Engineering’s Michael, KI8R, caught up with Tony, K1KP, Steve, N5AC, and Gerald, K5SDR, from FlexRadio during Orlando HamCation for a deep dive into this breakthrough rig.”

Computing & AI

• Microsoft Just Patched a Record 570 Flaws in Windows — The takeaway? Patch now as this release included patches for three zero-day vulnerabilities.

• Someone connected a Raspberry Pi 4B to an old, unsupported Kindle, and now it’s an e-ink dashboard — Probably because I have old Kindles and some Raspberry Pi boards, this looks like a great way to combine old and new tech.

• The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age — “The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks.”

14. QRT: End Transmission

I thought it would be an easier week but a plumbing leak in the kitchen dispelled that notion. As I type this, I have a fan going to keep air moving and a dehumidifier operating to try and dry out the wood under the kitchen linoleum tiles.

The good news is we have a new faucet. The bad news is the cost of the plumber to install the faucet was about what a new mid-range HF radio costs. When I heard the price, I was gobsmacked. But it works well and that is what is important.

I added a few nylon mooring cleats to my little dinghy to make it easier to tie to the dock. When I say little, I mean tiny: it is a six-foot-long fiberglass dinghy I bought for dragging behind the sailboat. Right now, though, it’s at the lake house with a small electric motor on it. As long as it’s not too windy or choppy on the lake, I feel perfectly safe out on the water. On the weekends when the wakeboard boats are generating big, sharp waves? The dinghy stays tied to the dock.

We have been settling back into a regular routine since last week’s ER visit. That gave me a little more time to work on the lawn and flower beds. My lavender plants really took off this year, making the bees very happy. I have a long line of nasturtiums coming up along a border and am looking forward to those flowering, too. The bees and hummingbirds are enjoying my flower pots on the deck, and that is where I sit with my Kindle e-reader and keep an eye on my spouse through a window.

Closer to radio, I realized it’s been a while since I logged into my Mastodon account: @kj7t@mastodon.radio. I think I need a weekly reminder to do that, so I don’t abandon folks who are waiting for a response.

I have much to be thankful for and appreciate my amateur radio hobby and radio friends very much.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

This week has raced by. It’s Thursday as I type this, and I’m behind schedule because of, well, life.

On the good news front, I got my LightAPRS Gateway device working. The story is on EtherHam. What I didn’t write about is learning about APRS over LoRa 70cm radio. While that has nothing to do with the LightAPRS device, it does touch APRS. I’m curious about this so I ordered a device (T-Deck Plus with GPS on 433MHz) to experiment with. Here’s the kicker, though: when I look at a map of APRS stations using LoRa, I find exactly one in Washington State. It’s an APRS-over-LoRa desert here. However, if I get my device running properly, maybe I can make a contact with the other station about 30 miles away. I might have to find a hill with line-of-sight to Seattle to make this happen. We’ll see!

For the LightAPRS device, I have a small dipole VHF antenna coming. I intended to set that a bit higher in the air on a fiberglass painter pole because I’d like to get a better signal in and out of the digi. I’m feeling pretty good about one watt through a small mag-mount, though:

2. Thank You…Supporters!

I have several people to thank for their support over the past few months. Most support comes in through the “buy me a coffee” system but there have also been EtherHam store purchases. Everything helps and is greatly appreciated.

• Coffees: Thank you to Rich, Ray, and David.

• EtherHam store: Thank you to Jeff, Rich, Joe, and Ren.

3. New on EtherHam

• Buying Push-to-Talk Over Cellular Without Getting Taken — I researched the current market, and this sent me down a deep rabbit hole. The push-to-talk over cellular field is confusing, and that confusion leans in favor of vendors, not buyers. If you’re thinking about buying one, or you already bought one and discovered it wasn’t quite what you expected, this guide walks through what nobody tells you upfront — using a car-lot analogy that will feel uncomfortably familiar. Read more in this EtherHam-exclusive guide.

• Concept: Using the Arduino UNO Q for Home Power Monitoring — What really drew me to this idea was the Arduino UNO Q's split-brain design: one board handling both real-time sensor capture and higher-level computing. These are jobs that used to require two separate devices. I sketched out (conceptually — not yet built) a whole-house power monitor with non-contact current clamps on the split-phase legs and an isolated voltage sensor. These are all read by the microcontroller side while Linux handles the math, logging, and dashboarding — no direct contact with bare conductors, ever. Full write-up, with parts list, firmware split, and dashboard options, is up on EtherHam.

• LightAPRS Gateway iGate Beacon Success — Troubleshooting Log — A week of ruling out CGNAT, firewalls, servers, and a suspicious libc6 upgrade led nowhere. The real fix turned out to be something I hadn’t considered: the callsign’s SSID itself. This post walks through the manual nc tests, the reboot comparisons, and the variable-isolation process that finally got KJ7T’s iGate beacons landing on aprs.fi — even though the server-side root cause remains a mystery. Bottom line: the digipeater is now working well, and I feel comfortable recommending the LightAPRS Digipeater, available from QRP Labs, as a fill-in digipeater and igate.

• Crossing the Chasm: Which Amateur Radio Technologies Actually Made It — Why did DMR and FT8 become fixtures in the shack while D-STAR and Fusion have not yet achieved that status? This piece maps ham radio’s real technology winners and still-rising projects — CW, SSB, FM, AllStarLink, AREDN mesh, and more — onto the classic “crossing the chasm” adoption curve. Borrowing a framework shared by an amateur radio friend, it asks what actually separates a solved problem from a brilliant piece of engineering still waiting for its moment. Along the way, it builds context to help you place your own favorite radios, modes, and projects on that same curve.

• Weekly Report: July 9, 2026 — The weekly report covers band conditions, digital radio news, and a digest of Groups.io messages. The Repeater Builder group was the most active this week with 142 messages posted.

4. QSO One: A New Way onto AllStarLink

There’s a new app making the rounds in the AllStarLink and EchoLink space, and it’s worth a mention here even though I’m not ready to give it the full workbench treatment over at EtherHam. It’s called QSO One, and the pitch is simple: get on AllStarLink, EchoLink, DMR, and M17 from a Windows PC or Android phone, with no node to build, no hotspot to flash, and no radio interface to wire up. Twenty-five dollars, five minutes, and you’re keyed up.

I’ve spent some time this week reading through the developer’s own posts on the AllStarLink community forum, and the backstory is a good one. A ham out of Willoughby Hills, Ohio — Frank, KD8JKK, node 46369 — got pulled back into the hobby by a bad storm earlier this year, found his local repeaters quiet, drifted over to EchoLink, heard AllStarLink had grown, went looking for a modern Windows client, and found nothing. IAXRpt has been abandoned since 2019. So he built his own, reverse-engineering the IAX2 protocol frame by frame rather than leaning on an existing library.

That’s the kind of scrappy, solve-my-own-problem origin story I have a soft spot for. It’s also exactly why I’m not writing this up as a proper EtherHam review yet.

The open beta only went live in early May. As recently as this month, the developer rebuilt the entire audio engine from scratch — giving each network its own dedicated audio lane — because testers were reporting stuttering and garbled audio, the kind of thing one beta tester colorfully described as “wrestling the alligator to the ground.” Early reports since the rebuild sound genuinely improved, but that’s a few weeks of data, not a few years. There’s also been at least one credential-storage bug that could silently drop saved logins, but that has since been patched with a self-healing backup.

None of that is damning for a young project. But it does mean the honest way to describe QSO One right now is “promising and moving fast” rather than “proven.” Worth noting, regardless of how the audio engine matures: this is, as far as I can tell, a one-person operation. One developer wrote the IAX2 stack from scratch, runs the beta, answers the forum posts, and — per the latest update — now runs the backend account system that stores your saved nodes and favorites.

It's also a closed codebase, so there's no way for the community to audit the IAX2 reverse-engineering work, verify what happens to saved credentials, or fork it if Frank stops maintaining it. If Frank steps away for any reason, there may be no one else who understands that code well enough to keep it running. That’s a real single-point-of-failure risk for anyone thinking about leaning on it for a regular net check-in.

So this is an app worth watching, built by someone clearly solving a problem, at a price low enough that trying it costs you little. I find it a very interesting project and hope it continues to mature and grow. I’ll keep an eye on it, and if it’s still standing — and sounding good — in a few months, it’ll earn a proper look on the EtherHam workbench.

5. Claude’s Wild Two Weeks: Export Bans and a New Default

I’ve been seeing changes over the past few weeks in the models made available in Claude, so I naturally wondered what was going on. I learned that Anthropic just had one of its busiest stretches yet. If you use Claude for anything, here’s what you should know.

I’m on the Pro subscription, so the default model change described below affects me, and that change is what caused me to dig into this topic.

The default model quietly flipped. On July 1, Claude Sonnet 5 became the default model for Free and Pro users, replacing Opus. That’s not a small swap — Sonnet 5 ships with a 1 million token context window and performs close to flagship-level Opus 4.8 on many tasks, at a fraction of the cost ($2/$10 per million input/output tokens through the end of August, then $3/$15). Opus is still there if you’re on Max, Team, or Enterprise, but it’s no longer what most people get by default. Anthropic is clearly betting that “good enough and cheap” wins more users than “best but pricey.”

If you are a Claude Pro user, three things change in practice. For those using a Claude Pro subscription, you’ll see three basic changes when you use Claude with the default Sonnet 5 engine:

• Speed and quota: Sonnet 5 is cheaper to run than Opus (roughly a fifth the cost per turn), so on a usage-capped plan like Pro, the same 45-prompts-per-5-hours allowance now stretches much further before you hit a limit. Responses also tend to come back faster since Sonnet is a lighter model.

• Capability: for the bulk of everyday tasks — writing, coding, research, general Q&A — Sonnet 5 performs close enough to Opus 4.8 that most people won’t notice a quality drop. Its 1M token context window means it can also handle very large documents or codebases in one go, which Opus couldn’t always do as cheaply.

• What you lose: for the hardest problems — deep architectural decisions, gnarly debugging, subtle reasoning tasks — Opus 4.8 still has an edge. On Pro you’d now need to manually select Opus for those cases rather than getting it automatically; Max, Team, and Enterprise plans keep broader access to it.

Net effect: most people get faster, more plentiful, “good enough” responses by default, with the option to reach for Opus deliberately when a task actually needs it.

The government forced Anthropic to pull its own flagship model offline. This is the wilder story. Claude Fable 5 and its sibling Mythos 5 launched June 12 — and three days later, the U.S. Commerce Department issued an export-control directive ordering Anthropic to cut off access for any foreign national, anywhere, including Anthropic’s own foreign employees. The trigger, reportedly: Amazon researchers found a jailbreak that got Fable 5 to write exploit code for a real software vulnerability, which was enough to get it treated like a controlled technology. Anthropic complied, access came back starting July 1 once the controls were lifted, and the company extended Fable 5’s free trial as an apology of sorts. It’s a preview of a regulatory fight that’s probably not over — frontier models getting treated like export-controlled hardware is new territory.

Opus 4.1 is on its way out. Deprecated on June 5, hard retirement on the API August 5. Anthropic wants everyone on Opus 4.8 instead, which also came with a real price cut — down from $15/$75 per million tokens to $5/$25, about a 67% reduction. If you’ve got anything hardcoded to claude-opus-4-1, you’ve got a month to migrate.

Cowork is leaving the desktop. Anthropic’s file-and-task agent tool, previously desktop-only, is expanding to web and mobile, with workflows able to keep running without an active browser session. Small item, but it fits the pattern: Anthropic is pushing agents further into everyday, non-coding work.

The takeaway: Anthropic is optimizing for cheaper defaults and broader access, while getting a real taste of what “AI as a national security concern” looks like in practice. It’s worth watching whether the export-control precedent becomes a recurring headache or a one-off situation. This is new ground for all of us.

Sources: Anthropic, TechCrunch, Forbes, Anthropic export control statement, Claude Platform Docs, Claude Sonnet 5 vs Opus 4.8: Price, Limits, and Benchmarks (SmartScope), Opus 4.8 vs Sonnet 5 vs Haiku 4.5: Which Claude Model to Use (The AI Career Lab)

6. An AI Price War Is Underway

While Anthropic was busy reshuffling its own model lineup, a bigger story has been playing out across the industry: the major AI labs are cutting prices against each other, hard.

It started at Google’s I/O conference in May 2026, where Google cut prices on its AI subscription plans — its top-tier Ultra plan dropped 20% — and rolled out a cheaper Gemini tier. Google’s Sundar Pichai pitched the math directly to enterprises: shift 80% of your AI workloads to Gemini and save over $1 billion a year. That was a shot aimed squarely at OpenAI and Anthropic.

Both companies responded. OpenAI has pricing pressure of its own to manage, and Anthropic followed with steep cuts on its side: Opus 4.8 came down from $15/$75 to $5/$25 per million tokens, and Sonnet 5 launched even cheaper at $2/$10. Meanwhile, cut-rate entrants like DeepSeek are underpricing all of them, competing with frontier-class models at a fraction of the cost.

The catch is this isn’t discounting from a position of strength. Running these models is genuinely expensive, and by most reporting, OpenAI and Anthropic are both still losing money at scale even before the price cuts. One data point making the rounds — Uber reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months after Claude Code adoption jumped from 32% to 84% of its engineering division. Cheaper per-token pricing helps users, but it raises the obvious question of how long labs can keep pushing prices down while costs stay high.

Sources: Welcome to the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google price wars (Sherwood News), Following Google Gemini price cuts, OpenAI also set for price reduction wave (TradingKey), AI Price War: OpenAI and Anthropic Face New Economics (The AI Chronicle)

7. Retevis RA89R Radio: FM and Weather Radio

Retevis advertises that the RA89R includes NOAA weather radio and weather alerts. I did not find pre-programmed weather frequencies in the radio. You can enter those frequencies directly in VFO mode, or program them yourself into the radio. That seems different from other radios that advertise NOAA weather channels — at least in my experience, with most including those as pre-set frequencies in the radio and accessible with the press of a button or two.

Here’s where the mini-manual let me down. How to tune to FM broadcast radio stations and how to receive NOAA weather broadcasts are not made clear. Exploring the Retevis app on my Android phone makes it evident you can set FM broadcast radio frequencies in the app, and when you write the data to the radio, they are also saved there.

The only place I found to set NOAA weather radio frequencies is in the app, then you write the data to the radio and call up those frequencies as saved channels.

So: if you are looking for FM broadcast radio frequencies or NOAA weather stations in your new Retevis RA89R radio, they aren’t there. The easiest solution is to use the app over Bluetooth to program those into the app and then write those settings to the radio.

8. EFHW Came Down

Monday morning dawned, and since I was up early, I thought I’d fire up the IC-7300 MK2 transceiver and work some FT8 while my wife was waking up. First things first, though: check the antenna. And surprise: it had come down from the tall branch above the deck!

This could be the catalyst for me to finally finish soldering the last few wires on my pneumatic launcher kit.

9. QRT: End Transmission

Another interesting week is in my rearview mirror.

I’m on my high school class reunion committee. A few years ago — at my urging — we formed a 501(c)(7) nonprofit “social club” to govern the finances and provide activities for our surviving classmates. Why? Because some classmates have substantial net worth and did not want to be held personally liable if something went wrong at/after a reunion event. The nonprofit social club approach tackles that exposure (along with event insurance), and it also helps us not to lose track of each other in the years between events.

We actually have a great time when we get together. This year will be a picnic and barbecue, and we’ll take lots of pictures for our classmates who could not attend.

On the IT side of this, I’m in charge of the class database and the website. We had more than 500 students in our senior class, so it’s a bit of a lift to keep up with all of them. Many people have passed and we’ve lost touch with quite a few folks, but we remain in contact with more than 200 classmates. All in all, I think our news reaches about 300 classmates. While I wish it could be more, that’s pretty good, considering how many years it has been since we flipped our tassels and walked off stage.

The other big challenge this week was a medical issue with my wife, resulting in a trip to the emergency room. I always figure a minimum of four hours to get in and out of the ER — this one consumed eight hours. The ER was swamped with people, so my wife’s procedure was done in the hallway, and that’s where I stayed by her side that entire time. The important conclusion to this: she’s back home and feeling better.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

1. QRV: Are You Ready?

Welcome to Random Wire 189.

This past week was interesting as I worked on this Random Wire newsletter. The week prior, I got busy with projects while writing RW 188, including experimenting with the Arduino UNO Q. That struck a chord with about a dozen subscribers, and it was apparently not a welcome sound: they unsubscribed this week. I’m guessing about why they dropped, of course. At the same time, I welcome the several new subscribers who joined the Random Wire family this week.

As I’ve thought about this, I think it’s probably a natural outcome of how people choose to subscribe. They find something about the Random Wire newsletter in a publication or by word of mouth, and since they learn of this newsletter from amateur radio sources, they assume it’s all about amateur radio. And of course, it is about amateur radio, but it is not only about radio. I look at the modern, internet-connected, technology-focused side of amateur radio. For subscribers expecting “all RF, all the time,” this would be a disappointment.

I have my RF-only days, too. I get it. At the same time, focusing only on RF is a bit like driving a car with a manual transmission, manual steering, and roll-up windows: it works, but it isn’t as comfortable as a modern personal vehicle. We live in a technology-dominated world, and I choose to let tech augment my amateur radio play. Not everyone chooses to do that, and that’s okay.

For those of us who do marry technology and radio, you are in good company. I call us “EtherHams” and it’s why I named the workbench-focused side of this newsletter EtherHam.com.

And speaking of EtherHam.com, a big thank you to Jeff for purchasing a quality Champion-brand hoodie from the EtherHam store. Store purchases help support this newsletter and the EtherHam site. I wish I had permission to use his photo because it looks great!

2. Thank You…Paul N4FTD

Community shows up in all sizes — sometimes it’s a hoodie purchase, sometimes it’s something that changes how you see the whole hobby. This week I want to talk about the second kind.

Coming straight from the heart, this won’t be a highly polished thank you note.

I extend my sincere gratitude to Paul N4FTD who took time months ago to reach out and build a friendship with me. It turns out we share many of the same things, from caring for our spouses to how we grew up. It has been, and continues to be, a joy to recognize someone traveling alongside me, albeit on the other side of the country. You can find Paul’s radio writing in ROTA-Radio.

As radio amateurs, we usually talk with our radio friends about radios, antennas, and technology. But much of this hobby is really about connecting in a meaningful way with other radio amateurs. I’m reminded of how COVID impacted some of our most vulnerable amateurs who, it turned out, didn’t just look forward to being with like-minded people at their monthly ham radio club meeting — they needed that contact. When COVID took that away, they suffered. Socializing at the monthly meeting was vital for their well being. When meetings resumed, they made sure to attend each one. I noticed their joy at being back in the room with other amateurs.

We are important to each other in ways we may not always see or understand, but it is real and impactful. I hope you’ll choose to reach out to someone new to you in our wide, far-reaching amateur radio community, even if only to say hello.

That kind of connection is the reason I do any of this. But most of my hours this week were spent somewhere less sentimental — the workbench.

3. New on EtherHam

I didn’t do any original coding this week. Instead, I’ve been fixing code, testing my Arduino devices, and starting a few more projects.

• Weekly Report: July 2, 2026 — Catch up with band conditions, digital radio news, and the Groups.io digest.

• LightAPRS Gateway 1.0 — First Impressions — There are updates posted at the end of the article, because while I thought I solved the issue, it turns out I had not. RF beaconing has been reliable, igating has not. It does not appear to be a fault with the device but I’m not sure yet what the problem is. I worked on this for three days before reaching out to LightAPRS support for help. We’ve been changing parameters, letting the device run, then looking at logs. Hopefully this will get resolved very soon.

4. In The Shack

While the LightAPRS mystery simmers, a new radio showed up that deserves its own writeup.

4.1 Retevis RA89R: Very First Impressions

I saw a review of the Retevis RA89R radio and was intrigued. The $65 Retevis RA89R arrived Wednesday evening and I immediately put it on the charger. Thursday, I turned it on for the first time.

Retevis RA89R Ham Radio, Cross-Band Repeater, APP Setting, Dual Band Handheld Radio, High Power Two Way Radio, 2800mAh USB-C Rechargeable, IP54, Long Range Walkie Talkies for Emergency, Survival (this is an affiliate link)

My very first impression? Solid build. The radio with the battery installed has some heft to it. The battery back is rounded, making it fit nicely in your hand. The two PTT buttons take a moment to get used to, because if you are trying to use VFO B but are pressing the VFO A push-to-talk button, it’s not going to work (more on this in a moment).

When I went into the menu, I immediately noticed the radio was set to a wider frequency range than my license allows. I changed the start and end frequency to 144-148 MHz for VHF and 420-450 MHz for UHF, per the ARRL band plan.

I was able to set frequencies through the radio keypad but my CTCSS tone did not stick when I saved it (probably user error). So I cranked up the Retevis app on my Android phone, connected to the radio over Bluetooth, and set the tone there. Once saved to the radio, that worked fine.

In a few minutes, I was checking my audio on my duplex AllStar node 588418. That node intakes RF on 431.180 MHz and transmits to my radio on 147.47 MHz. The 431.180 frequency also requires a CTCSS tone. I have the RX frequency (147.47) in VFO A and TX (431.18) in VFO B. While testing and not having any success, I realized I was pressing the VFO A PTT instead of the VFO B PTT. It’s a simple thing, but it will trip you up if you’re not used to having two PTT buttons. (Note that the manual calls these Band A and Band B buttons.)

Here’s another counterintuitive “aha” moment: it doesn’t matter which VFO is active on the radio. If the arrow is pointing at VFO A and you push the VFO B PTT, you will transmit on VFO B.

The display is easy to read…indoors. Outside in the sunshine, it fades and is hard to read, even set to the brightest setting.

The radio sounds good…maybe not quite as nice as my BTECH UV-PRO, but the audio is clear and has plenty of volume for me.

USB-C charging is a welcome feature, with a USB-C charging port on the battery and on the desktop charger. This makes it easy to grab the radio and go, knowing you can recharge it in the field. However, I noticed that none of my Power Delivery-capable chargers would charge the radio. Instead, I had to use a small “dumb” wall wart like we used to get when we bought a Kindle e-reader. One advertisement indicates it requires a 5V 2A charger, and that agrees with my experience.

The belt clip attaches to the battery. I’m not a fan of this arrangement. The base of the radio is large enough and flat enough that it stands nicely on a desk or shelf.

The product page says it has airband receive, FM broadcast receive, and NOAA weather alerts, but I have not yet tested those capabilities.

One ad says the radio is “moisture resistant” but without an IP rating, I can’t determine what this means.

One other slight gripe is the functions associated with keypad buttons are not labeled on the radio. You have to look at page 6 in the manual to know what they do. Nobody wants to carry a manual with them. Fortunately, the manual is not just a sheet of paper — it’s a real mini-manual that is well written.

So two strikes right out of the gate are: dim display in sunlight and the belt clip attaches to the battery instead of the radio body. But on the plus side, this dual band radio has a solid build, good audio, and a 2800MAh battery, at a very attractive price point. If you need a tough analog VHF/UHF radio and don’t want to spend much money, consider the Retevis RA89R.

The Retevis will need more bench time before I trust a verdict. The other project living on my bench this week has already earned mine: the UNO Q ASL node.

4.2 The UNO Q ASL Node is Working Well

Last week I went all-in on the Arduino UNO Q, and after setting up and using a couple of different Q devices, I’m still a fan. They are working delightfully well. Unlike my Raspberry Pi devices, I worry much less about the Q-based devices because they use durable eMMC storage instead of damage-prone microSD cards.

The AllStar node I’m running on a UNO Q uses Ampersand-ASL for AllStarLink connectivity and an AllScan USB Communications Interface for audio. It’s a very compact package:

In the view above, the UNO Q is in a metal case, forming the bottom layer of this little cake. A small USB-C hub is the next layer up, and the AllScan UCI80M tops the pile.

The user interface (UI) for Ampersand-ASL looks different than what you may be used to. You add favorite nodes on the Configuration screen, then on the Home page, you select one of those nodes to connect to it. In the screenshot below, you can see the favorites (green buttons) I’ve set for node 588414 on the UNO Q:

A quick note about the two different parrots. Node 2002 (ASL Parrot) is a standard parrot node running on the conventional ASL3/Asterisk and app_rpt stack. That stack has a hard-coded 8kHz sample rate. Node 2002 is locked to 8K audio because that’s simply what Asterisk/app_rpt does everywhere, including in parrot mode.

Node 61057 (AMP Parrot) runs on Ampersand-ASL, Bruce MacKinnon KC1FSZ’s from-scratch C++ reimplementation of the AllStarLink protocol that implements the IAX2 protocol directly, uses ALSA natively for audio, and does not use Asterisk at all. Because it was built from the ground up rather than inheriting Asterisk’s legacy code, it was easy to support 16Ksps codecs — that’s the whole point of the project’s design freedom. (16Ksps is 16,000 samples per second — a sampling rate of 16kHz. In contrast, standard telephone-quality audio that Asterisk-based systems use is 8,000 samples per second.)

4.3 Ampersand-ASL Gets an Update

Bruce MacKinnon KC1FSZ isn't done improving Ampersand-ASL. He pushed a fresh update to Ampersand-ASL this week, and I applied it to my AllStar node without a hitch. The update tidies up compile warnings, fixes the sluggishness that had been making the Configuration tab painful to use, and folds the boot race condition workaround — the ExecStartPre=/bin/sleep 10 fix I documented on EtherHam — into the official user documentation. The full update procedure and what changed is covered in the updated EtherHam article, How to Run AllStar on the Arduino UNO Q.

I also discovered this week that Bruce was kind enough to mention KJ7T on the main Ampersand project documentation page — both as a link to the EtherHam article and in the project’s contributor acknowledgements. That’s genuinely appreciated. Bruce is doing interesting work, he’s responsive to feedback, and he’s building something that matters to the ham community. If you’re running an AllStarLink node — or curious about running one on hardware that ASL3 doesn’t yet support — the Ampersand project is worth your attention.

4.4 Amp-ASL and the Pi Zero 2 W — A Quick Experiment

I looked down on my bench and saw TomStick, a Pi Zero 2 W in a Geekworm USB dongle case, and wondered: could Ampersand-ASL by Bruce KC1FSZ run on this single-board computer? The Zero 2 W is arm64, Debian-capable, and a lot of hams have one sitting around. If it worked, it would be a compelling option for a low-cost, low-footprint AllStarLink node using hardware you might already own.

The short answer: you can’t build Amp-ASL on a Pi Zero 2 W. The compiler ran out of memory twice trying to compile WebUi.cpp, even with a 512MB swap file added. The second time, the OOM (out of memory) killer was aggressive enough to terminate the SSH session along with the compiler. TomStick was fine afterward, but the message was clear: you can’t build Amp-ASL on this platform.

This isn’t really a knock on Amp-ASL — it’s a build-time constraint, not a runtime one. On my Arduino UNO Q node, the running amp-server process uses about 4.2MB of RAM. The Zero 2 W would probably run Amp-ASL if you could get the binary onto it. The problem is getting there: WebUi.cpp is simply too large to compile on 512MB of RAM, and the OOM killer has the final say.

Could you cross-compile on a more capable machine and copy the binary over? Probably — but that’s a different project for a different afternoon.

The practical takeaway: if you want to build and run Amp-ASL on arm64 hardware, you need more than 512MB RAM. It's worth noting that Bruce's documented test platforms are a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Dell Wyse 3040 mini-PC — both with substantially more RAM than the Zero 2 W's 512MB. I knew when I started this little side trip that the Pi Zero 2 W was going to be outside the tested envelope.

The UNO Q with 4GB RAM had no trouble at all. A Pi 3B+ (1GB) or Pi 4 (2GB or better) would be worth trying, and those results would be interesting. If you try it, let me know how it goes.

4.5 LightAPRS Digipeater: Hold the Phone

Not every experiment this week ended cleanly — and the LightAPRS saga from last issue still isn't over.

The LightAPRS Gateway I mentioned last week turned out to have a subtle reliability problem: it was beaconing to APRS-IS once on startup and then going silent. I thought I fixed it with a watchdog script to restart Direwolf if it stopped sending packets. However, the timer interval was too short, creating a doom loop that prevented the 60-minute scheduled beacon from firing.

As I continued to monitor the device, I discovered my watchdog script didn’t really fix the problem. Even with the fix, Direwolf’s iGate beacons were reaching APRS-IS on startup but subsequent scheduled beacons were silently disappearing. They appeared in the local journal as sent, the APRS-IS connection shows as verified, and yet neither aprs.fi nor findU.com shows they were received.

The most telling clue is that packets marked qAR — those received via RF and gated by other iGates in the area — appear on aprs.fi consistently. Only packets marked qAC, sent directly from this gateway to APRS-IS, go missing after the initial startup beacon. I have reproduced this using different APRS-IS servers and can rule out local network issues. I’ve submitted a detailed bug report to LightAPRS support and am working with them on a solution.

4.6 GitHub, git, and Me

Bug reports and waiting rooms aside, I've been fighting a different kind of frustration this week: GitHub.

I am discovering that I don’t speak GitHub at all well. If you want to post some code on GitHub.com, there are several sequential steps you must follow. I’m sure for experienced coders who have adapted to GitHub, it all makes sense. For me? Not so much. The sequence to accomplish anything strikes me as a bit convoluted and arcane. The interface and sequential process were crafted by coders for coders, and it is taking me some time to get used to it.

It’s getting better, though. I still look at my “GitHub recipe card” when I’m updating code in my GitHub EtherHam space or creating a new repository, but I’m starting to think ahead of the recipe.

Behind the scenes, I’m also using git. If I thought GitHub was oblique, git doubles down on that. However, git is ultimately made simpler to use and understand because there is no graphical user interface like GitHub uses: git is 100% through the terminal. That means I don’t have to split my brain between terminal and GUI, and I do find that a bit simpler.

One thing I am certain of: it’s going to take me a while — months, maybe years — to really grok GitHub and git. These systems do not align with how my brain processes information and procedures. But as with all things about amateur radio, part of the joy is in learning new things, and GitHub and git are definitely stimulating learning! They no longer feel quite as new and raw when I use them.

4.7 Panasonic ToughBook CF54 Media Bay

GitHub isn't the only thing that fought me this week. My ToughBook did too — just with screwdrivers instead of a terminal.

The batteries in my ToughBook appeared to be original and were no longer holding much of a charge, so I replaced the main battery. Talk about a night and day difference! Where I would get about an hour out of the main battery, now I get at least five hours.

The ToughBook’s media bay held a similarly worn-out accessory battery. Replacing it would be expensive at about twice the price of the main battery so instead I ordered a multi-drive.

Well. Installing the DVD multi-drive proved to be more complicated than I expected. It isn’t plug-and-play. Instead, the bottom plate on the laptop must be removed, then several bits of black plastic shielding need to be pulled back or removed to expose the socket. It takes a ribbon cable that is attached to the back of the drive. Once the drive is inserted, the ribbon cable goes in the matching socket…but this one looked odd. No release levers on it. No cover over it. It was not like any ZIF (zero insertion force) socket I’ve seen.

I tried sticking the ribbon cable under the socket — nope, no space. No place for it to go in the socket, either. Trying to manipulate the socket I could feel how brittle the plastic was. It wasn’t going to accept much force before breaking. I concluded that the cover on the socket had previously been broken off, so this was never going to work.

I backed out of this and reassembled the bits, then ordered a dummy plug to seal the media bay from dust and foreign objects. That will be good enough. I have an external USB drive for CDs and DVDs, and that will have to do. Once everything was buttoned up again, I tested to make sure the computer booted up cleanly…and it did.

4.8 Try the Random Wire Archive Search

After all that hardware wrangling, it was nice to end the week with a piece of software I wrote that just worked.

If you are a Substack author, you already know how abysmal is Subtack’’s search capability. I wrote Substack Search to be a full-text search index for your Substack archive, self-hosted on your own web server. The code and instructions are available in my EtherHam GitHub space.

For my subscribers, the value of building my own search function is in the improved search results. Try it yourself at: https://etherham.com/rw_search/index.html

The interface is very simple. If you want to search on a phrase, enclose it in parentheses.

I’ve updated the code a couple of times to address update and search issues. All should be working well now, but if you encounter problems, please do let me know.

5. Are ESP32 Processors Used in F1 Racing?

Not everything on my bench this week was a repair or a tool, though. Some of it was just a question I couldn't let go of.

While watching the Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix race, I wondered: do the sensors on the race cars use ESP32 boards? The short answer: definitely not in actual F1 cars, but surprisingly, ESP32s show up around F1 in some really fun hobbyist ways. Here’s the full picture.

On the actual cars

Real F1 cars are a world apart from consumer microcontrollers. An F1 car has around 300 sensors, and the standard ECU — the TAG-320B — monitors over 4,000 parameters. Those sensors connect either through analog systems to the ECU, or through a series of CAN buses (Controller Area Network — an automotive-standard network bus). There are 17 separate CAN buses on a car in its typical configuration, each communicating with many different devices. (More: Feature: Data and Electronics in F1, Explained!)

Today’s F1 cars generate on the order of 1 terabyte of data per car per race weekend. Teams use high-bandwidth radio systems to send telemetry in real time to the garage, where engineers monitor car health and performance on multiple screens. The central data logger runs on an Intel Atom-based unit on a Linux RTOS, with 1 GB of integrated logging memory, GPS, and an integrated telemetry unit. (More: How Many Sensors Does Formula 1 Have?)

So the electronics are custom aerospace-grade hardware — nothing close to an ESP32 in terms of specs, hardening, or regulatory approval.

Where ESP32s show up

The hobbyist/maker community has embraced the ESP32 for F1-adjacent projects:

• Makers have built F1 pit wall displays using an ESP32 CYD (a ~€10 board with a built-in 320×240 touchscreen and Wi-Fi) consuming live timing data from the OpenF1 API. The architectural lesson from that project is telling: the ESP32 works best as a display device, not a data processor — a Raspberry Pi or other server handles the API aggregation, and the ESP32 makes a single HTTP request for pre-digested data. (More: Build an F1 Pit Wall Display with ESP32 CYD and OpenF1 API)

• In lower-tier electric racing (not F1), ESP32 microcontrollers have actually been used for real telemetry — handling analog data acquisition, local preprocessing, and wireless communication via LoRa in Colombia’s National Electric Drive Vehicle Competition. (More: An IoV-Based Real-Time Telemetry and Monitoring System for Electric Racing Vehicles: Design, Implementation, and Field Validation)

• Sim racing enthusiasts use ESP32s to parse the UDP telemetry packets that the F1 video game series broadcasts, building physical dashboard displays for their rigs.

So ESP32s are great tools for watching F1, but the actual cars run purpose-built, FIA-regulated electronics at a scale and spec where a $5 Espressif chip would be completely out of its depth.

What about radios?

As I was diving headfirst into ESP32s and Formula 1, I also wondered: what radios are used in F1 racing? Are they anything we are familiar with? It turns out there are two distinct radio systems at work.

Vehicle telemetry data

According to a former F1 engineer, the telemetry system uses a proprietary WiMAX 802.16 implementation managed by McLaren Applied for all teams, based on technology from former startup Picochip. It runs on 3.5 GHz spectrum that’s virtually available worldwide. For each circuit, temporary base stations are built so the mesh provides complete coverage. (More: F1 telemetry dissected: from sensor to strategy in milliseconds)

Data is sent using 1,000 to 2,000 telemetry channels, transmitted wirelessly at around 1.5 GHz or a frequency allowed by local authorities. All data is sent in encrypted form, and the typical delay between data collection and reception at the garages is 2 milliseconds.

So the telemetry is operating in the 1.5–3.5 GHz range, depending on the source. The discrepancy in this range isn’t fully explained by what I found, but let’s agree these are outside the frequency ranges most radio amateurs use.

Team voice communications

Voice communications use a completely separate system. The vast majority of F1 teams and officials use a single TETRA digital trunked radio system provided by Riedel Communications, operating in the 420–430 MHz range (downlink) and 410–420 MHz (uplink). Some teams use alternate systems — Williams and McLaren switched to a Kenwood NXDN Nexedge system operating in the 446–473 MHz range. (More: Formula 1 (F1) by TheRadioReference Wiki)

In amateur radio terms: voice comms are solidly in the 70 cm UHF band, while the data telemetry is up in the microwave range — much more like 802.11 Wi-Fi territory.

6. Short Stack of Internet Finds

As you might expect immediately following Field Day, a Google search on “amateur radio” yields a trove of Field Day news items.

Radio

• REMINDER: RadioID.net to require annual verification — “Beginning July 1, 2026, RadioID.net will implement an annual verification process. On the anniversary of each account's creation, RadioID.net will send an email to the account holder requesting confirmation that the assigned ID(s) are still needed and that the account information remains accurate and up to date.”

• Requiem For Long Wave, As The BBC Goes Silent — “Something happened…which will have been unnoticed by many, but which for a certain breed of radio enthusiast marks the end of an era. The BBC stopped broadcasting Radio 4 on their 198 kHz Long Wave frequency, ending over a century of transmission in the band.”

• Measuring Radio Noise and Interference in Amateur Radio: Field Strength Meter, Gauss Meter, and Better Tools — “The short answer is this: for amateur radio interference, a radio-frequency field strength meter, SDR, spectrum analyzer, or receiver with a suitable antenna is normally more useful than a gauss meter or tesla meter.”

• America’s 250th Birthday Bash Special Event Station — “Join me on JULY 4TH on the hf bands and help me help you celebrate America’s Birthday.

  I have secured the special event callsign W2A.”

• Overview of Retevis RA89R and RA89G — I’m intrigued by the RA89R as it advertises dual bands with cross-band repeat, suggesting that it might actually have independent VFOs. I doubt it, especially at this price point. I believe it is actually a half-duplex radio. But I do think it might work for pseudo-duplex use with a full-duplex AllStar node by configuring one VFO for transmitting and one for receiving, but I won’t know until I try it. With USB-C charging, Bluetooth programming, and up to 10 watts of output, it’s worth gambling $65 on this.

• Ham Radio Digital Mode Frequencies Chart [HF Through 70cm] — “Unlike voice contacts, where activity is spread across an entire band, digital operators usually meet on well-established “watering hole” frequencies.”

• HRWB 266 - All About AMSAT With Drew Glasbrenner KO4MA — “In this episode we meet Drew Glasbrenner, KO4MA, the new president of AMSAT, the amateur radio satellite organization.”

Computing

• It’s now the Arduino Uno Q’s turn to get a price hike — “Two versions of the single-board microcomputer will be $15 to $20 more expensive starting next month.” Glad I stocked up with a few spare boards!

• Best Raspberry Pi Alternatives: 4 Options to Consider — This is an article I wish I had written. It’s a good overview of alternatives, even if it doesn’t include the Arduino UNO Q board.

• 5 things to build with the $4 chip that’s outselling the Raspberry Pi — “There are tons of cheaper Raspberry Pi alternatives that work just as well, and one among them is the ESP32. It won't run Linux or host your home server, but at just $5, this chip can do more than it lets on.”

• Raspberry Pi Locator Website To Shut Down In July — “As announced by [André] on Bluesky, next month the much loved Rpilocator.com website will cease displaying the stock status and pricing of Raspberry Pi computers from various online retailers.”

7. June 17, 1936: The Day Radio Heard Itself Clearly

One story from ninety years ago felt worth pulling out of the noise…literally.

On June 17, 1936 — ninety years ago this month — Edwin Howard Armstrong walked into the Federal Communications Commission headquarters and changed what radio sounded like. He played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. A reporter in the room wrote that if the fifty engineers present had closed their eyes, they would have believed the jazz band was playing in the same room. No static. No hiss. No interference. Just music.

Armstrong had been working toward that moment for years. Frustrated by AM’s vulnerability to static and interference — a physics problem baked into amplitude modulation itself — he pursued a different approach: instead of varying the strength of the radio wave to carry sound, he varied its frequency. The result was a signal that natural static simply couldn’t touch. FM didn’t reduce interference. It eliminated it. The silence between the notes was actually silent.

You would think that kind of demonstration would change everything immediately but it didn’t. RCA’s David Sarnoff, who had been Armstrong’s friend, saw FM not as a breakthrough but as a threat. Thousands of AM transmitters and millions of AM receivers could become obsolete. The broadcast networks had enormous investments in AM. And Sarnoff had his eye on television — he didn’t have the bandwidth to also champion a new radio system. So RCA used its considerable influence to slow FM down: lobbying the FCC, disputing Armstrong’s patents, and eventually developing their own FM technology while refusing to pay royalties on his.

The fight consumed the last years of Armstrong’s life. By 1954 he was financially exhausted from the legal battles and deeply depressed. He died by suicide in January of that year, never knowing how the story ended. His wife Marion continued the patent fight after his death, and in 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that Armstrong had indeed invented FM. He was right all along — he just didn’t live to hear the verdict.

Every time you tune an FM radio, every time a silent passage is actually silent, you’re experiencing what Armstrong proved in that FCC hearing room in 1936. He didn’t get the recognition or the royalties he deserved, but he got the physics right. For radio amateurs, his story is a reminder that the people who build the tools don’t always get to enjoy the world those tools create. We work the bands they made possible, often without a second thought about who fought to make them available.

8. Gadgets: Headphones, DAC, and Player

I found myself thinking about Armstrong and audio fidelity again this week for a much lighter reason: new headphones.

I bought a pair of SENNHEISER HD 599 Open Back Headphones on special during Amazon Prime Days. They were roughly one-half their normal price. I’ve paired them with a Fosi Audio K5 Pro DAC. My digital music catalog is stored on my Beelink network-attached storage box, and I play that library with MusicBee on my laptop. Player Preferences in MusicBee is set to WASAPI (Exclusive) to bypass the Windows sound system.

If you’re a basshead, these are probably not the headphones for you. They deliver a flatter response across audible frequencies and present a more open, airy soundscape. Of course, you can dial up the bass with an equalizer or with the DAC. If I dial up the bass all the way on the DAC, audio is still clear but the deep tones overpower mid and high frequencies, at least for my ears.

I am not an audiophile but I do like clear audio where I can separate instruments and voices, and where I can feel like I’m in the hall with the performers. The open back headphones provide a wonderfully open sound without the sound pressure that some closed headphones can project. The funny thing about saying “I’m not an audiophile” is good quality recordings and equipment provide an experience that is viscerally and audibly better than poorer equipment. You don’t have to be an audiophile to appreciate good sound.

On the DAC, I have the bass and treble controls set at the one o’clock position. To me, this moves the sound stage a bit forward, as if the performance is closer to me. Need more bass? Try setting the DAC bass control to three o’clock or more. In MusicBee, I’ve set the equalizer to the Acoustic profile, which I find most pleasing for the music I listen to.

One of the wonderful things about this combination is the silence. Silence during pieces, and between songs, have no hiss, no hum, no thrumming sound, nothing. Just silence. That really plays well with The High Kings when they punctuate their tight harmonies with moments of silence before the next attack.

I would describe this combination of headphones, DAC, and player as a solid mid-tier setup for someone who likes to hear parts and harmonies. As I write this, I’m listening to acoustic sounds by The Wailin’ Jennys (40 Days album) and The High Kings (Grace & Glory, and The High Kings). Also, The Corrs, as well as Chris Botti.

Acoustic Highway by Craig Chaquico sounds amazing. I can hear the left and right background instruments clearly. There is more texture to his music than you might hear over a radio. And Jazz Samba by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd is astounding: very present, very clear.

It’s not all quiet stuff. Earth Wind and Fire’s punchy, percussive music sounds delightfully crisp. The overtones of Eddie Van Halen’s high notes on Eruption come through with clear brilliance, and Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love sounds like it is being played on a wide sound stage. If you like that song but also like musical interpretations, I invite you to compare it with Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love by Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox on the Lounge Language Models album.

9. QRT: End Transmission

Good sound isn't the only thing that's mattered to me this week.

Earlier this week, two women who taught alongside my wife for fifteen years came to visit her. My wife can no longer speak (rarely, she says a few words), but she was present in every way that mattered — attentive, tracking the conversation, trying to engage. Watching her with her friends, I was reminded of what I wrote earlier in this issue about Paul: we are important to each other in ways we may not always see or understand.

That evening, she looked over at me and clearly said, “Hi Tom.”

This was more meaningful than it might appear, because twice in the past month, she has looked at me and asked: “Who are you?” So you’ll understand why those two words — “Hi, Tom” — stopped me cold.

I’m glad she knew me in that moment. I’m glad her friends came. Some things matter more than radio.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

00 QRV: Are You Ready?

This was the week of Q — no, not the Q from the James Bond franchise, but a tiny Arduino-based computer board. The UNO Q is featured in three articles about using it for amateur radio use. One is a comparison with other platforms, one details an AllStar build with Ampersand-ASL, and the other describes setting up a Q with WSJT-X and GridTracker2 for HF digital work.

It’s ARRL Field Day weekend! Enjoy yourself on the air, and hopefully you’ll be able to attend a local Field Day event. For some, it’s a contest. For others, it’s a party. For many of us, it is a fine excuse to visit with our radio friends.

01 Thank You…ARISS

Some things lodge themselves in your memory so firmly that you can still feel them sixty years later.

I was almost six years old on February 20, 1962, when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. I remember sitting transfixed, listening to his voice coming live from space. I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing, but I understood that a human being was up there, and his voice was coming down to us through the air. That moment planted something.

The Mercury program didn’t involve amateur radio, but the connection between space and radio has deepened considerably since then. Through ARISS — Amateur Radio on the International Space Station — astronauts have been talking to schoolchildren from orbit for decades. A kid with a handheld transceiver and lightweight beam antenna can have a two-minute conversation with a crew member on the ISS. I can’t think of a better recruitment tool for this hobby, or a better use of the radio spectrum.

So: thank you, John Glenn, for planting the radio bug in me. And thank you to everyone at ARISS who turned that wonder into something kids can still experience today. You bring the magic of radio into young hearts and minds.

02 New on EtherHam

With three new articles this week about the Arduino UNO Q board, it is apparent that I’m quite taken with this little ARM-based computer.

• LightAPRS Gateway 1.0 — First Impressions — I received this device last night and had it on my network and working within 20 minutes.

• Resurrecting a Forgotten HSR-USB as an AllStar Node — A forgotten HSR-USB board in the back of the drawer had no documentation and I had no memory of what frequency it was programmed on. Eventually, I was able to interrogate the SA818 chip to determine frequencies and CTCSS tones. The device is rescued from the drawer and back in service as AllStar node 578498.

• The Arduino UNO Q: Affordable, Ready to Run, and Surprisingly Capable — In this piece, I develop a high-level comparison of the UNO Q with the Raspberry Pi 5, Dell Wyse 3040, and N-series mini PCs. If you’ve never thought about trying the UNO Q, start with this article.

• How to Run AllStar on the Arduino UNO Q — Seeing that this had been done by a few others, I dove in and documented how to get Ampersand-ASL running on the UNO Q platform.

• FT8 Digital Modes on the Arduino UNO Q: Installing WSJT-X and GridTracker2 — This was a big little project this week and a quite satisfying one, at that. The result? I have a dedicated WSJT-X/GridTracker2 platform attached to my Icom IC-7300MK2 transceiver. I no longer have to set up my ham radio laptop to do FT8 work, and even better, I can run FT8 remotely from another part of the house.

• Build Your Own Substack Archive Search — I started publishing on Substack in 2022, and over the years, I’ve grown more and more frustrated by the truly abysmal search capability on that platform. So I did something about it with my own search system.

• Weekly Reports: June 25, 2026 — The 20 and 17-meter bands should be reliable workhorses this coming week. Digital radio news was very light this cycle. On the Groups.io front, I checked 26 groups with 465 messages.

03 Built and Working: AllStar with an Arduino

I’ve been wanting to try building an AllStarLink node with an Arduino UNO Q board for a while. The UNO Q runs full Debian Linux on a Qualcomm ARM64 processor, costs around $60, and fits in your hand. If you’ve been eyeing a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 for a project like this and balking at current prices and availability, the UNO Q is worth a serious look.

Getting AllStar running on it turned out to be more interesting than I expected. The mainstream ASL3 software stack doesn’t quite work on the UNO Q yet — the board’s custom Qualcomm kernel is missing an audio interface that ASL3 depends on. That’s being worked on, and it might be resolved by the time you read this. But today, the proven path is a project called Ampersand-ASL, written by Bruce MacKinnon KC1FSZ. Bruce built a complete AllStar node implementation from scratch in C++ — no Asterisk, no DAHDI, no kernel module compilation. Just clean code that speaks IAX2 natively and connects to the AllStarLink network the same as any other node.

I named my ASL node the QNode. It’s running on the AllStarLink network as node 588414 under KJ7T, connected via a USB radio interface and a Motorola speaker-mic. The audio quality is solid — I pulled a clip from ARRL Audio News through the node and it came back clean and clear. You can hear it below:

(For the audio fade in and out, I used Tenacity, a fork of Audacity.)

The software build itself took an afternoon, mostly because I ran into three non-obvious gotchas that anyone attempting this will hit: a HID device permissions issue that silences PTT, a missing group membership for the arduino user, and a systemd race condition that causes silent audio on every boot until you add a ten-second startup delay. None of them are hard to fix once you know what you’re looking at.

I’ve written it all up in detail over at EtherHam, including the ASL3 situation, the full build walkthrough, and the troubleshooting steps. If you want to put an AllStar node together on a budget and don’t mind building from source, this is a genuinely satisfying project. The article is titled How to Run AllStar on the Arduino UNO Q and it’s live now at EtherHam.com.

04 SuzieQ Gets a Job: FT8 with an Arduino

A subscriber sent me a note a few weeks ago saying he’d gotten WSJT-X and GridTracker2 running on an Arduino UNO Q. That was enough for me.

I spent a Saturday getting it working on my own UNO Q (named SuzieQ) which now lives next to the IC-7300MK2 in the sun room. The short version: it works, and it works well, with WSJT-X decoding signals, GridTracker2 painting stations on a world map, QSOs logging automatically to QRZ. All this runs headless on a board half the size of a playing card, accessible from anywhere in the house via RustDesk. I made the first confirmed QSO from the other side of the house, which felt like the right way to prove the point.

The total hardware cost — UNO Q, case, power supply, and USB hub — came to $120. For comparison, a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4B kit with storage runs $130 and up today, and with that you are stuck with a microSD card instead of the UNO Q’s soldered eMMC. I’m not saying the Pi isn’t a fine machine. I’m saying the math has changed.

The full write-up is at EtherHam.com, with all the commands, settings tables, and gotchas documented in enough detail that you should be able to follow along with your own hardware. If you have a radio with USB connectivity and you’ve been thinking about a dedicated digital modes platform, this is worth your time: FT8 Digital Modes on the Arduino UNO Q: Installing WSJT-X and GridTracker2

05 Code Fix: Substack Search

In continued testing of the Substack Search tool, I discovered I didn't code it right the first time. Searches for common terms like “Meshtastic” were returning HTTP 500 errors instead of results. The error log told the story: fts5: missing row 63 from content table. The full-text search index and the posts database had gotten out of sync.

The culprit was the update tool — the web page that lets me upload a fresh Substack export zip to add new issues to the index. The original code was doing incremental updates: deleting each post’s entry from the search index and reinserting it. That approach scrambled the internal row numbering that SQLite’s FTS5 search engine depends on, and searches started failing.

The fix was straightforward once the problem was clear. Instead of updating the search index one post at a time, the new code processes all the posts first and then rebuilds the entire index in a single clean pass. The result is the same — all posts indexed and searchable — but the internal bookkeeping stays consistent no matter how many times you run it.

If you grabbed the code from the EtherHamRadio/substack-search repository before this week, pull the updated update.php. If you built your initial database using Claude as described in the article, you may also need to rebuild the database from a fresh Substack export — the corruption only affects databases that have been through the update tool at least once.

06 In the Shack

Some Trouble with WPSD

I had some trouble with my Raspberry Pi 5 hotspot running the great WPSD software. My Wi-Fi would no longer connect and the region showed AD (Andorra), not US. When I reconfigured and hit save, nothing actually saved. I could boot up with the Ethernet cable connected and all was well. But I had no Wi-Fi connection: my router didn’t see the device and my settings wouldn’t save.

I downloaded a backup of the configuration and burned a fresh image, then booted up while connected via Ethernet. That gave me the opportunity to configure Wi-Fi, and this time, it saved it. Then I disconnected the Ethernet cable and rebooted again. After a few minutes, the dashboard came up. I restored my saved backup and the hotspot was functioning once again over Wi-Fi.

At first I thought: did I find a bug? But as I ran through the logic chain in my mind, I realized it was more likely the microSD card had become corrupted. To eliminate that possibility, I started over fresh. It turns out this was the right move.

If your Wi-Fi settings aren't saving and your region keeps reverting, don't waste time troubleshooting — just burn a fresh image. It's faster than chasing a corrupted filesystem.

A few days later, it wouldn’t boot. Eventually, I removed the cover and pulled off the MMDVM hat. Then it booted cleanly. While it was running, I put the MMDVM hat back on and suddenly there was my display. I suspect a bad connection on one of the GPIO pins…could be due to heat, could be oxidation. In any event, once I re-seated the hat, my problem went away.

And then I noticed my Raspberry Pi 4-based WPSD was set on simplex, not duplex. The modem version matched, so I wondered: if I restored my saved RPi 5 hotspot configuration to the RPi 4 machine, would it work? It should, since the hats were the same. At least that’s what I postulated, so I tried it. And it did work. My separate frequencies for TX and RX came in on the RPi 4 machine after restoring the RPi 5 backup to it. One gotcha, though: the hostname carried over from the RPi 5 backup to the RPi 4. This was easy to correct in the configuration screen.

Now I have two hotspots with frequencies programmed exactly the same, meaning one is now turned off and waiting in the wings in case my primary hotspot bites the dust.

ToughBook Battery, Part 2

I mentioned last week that the batteries in my old Panasonic ToughBook MK2 laptop appeared to be (a) original and (b) worn out. Accordingly, I bought a generic replacement battery and crossed my fingers that it would work. Well, it worked great. After charging it in the laptop, I got several hours of operating time from the battery. I ran it until the laptop shut down to condition it (although new tech batteries probably don’t need it like the older ones did).

The cost of the battery for the media bay is rather high — about twice the cost of the main battery for only 2/3 of the contained watts. The better play is to buy a media drive for that bay (done!) and buy a second main battery as a spare (not done). One main battery plus a spare will give me plenty of cushion for a long POTA session with the ToughBook.

Just Arrived: APRS Digipeater

My APRS device is being shipped from halfway across the planet, from Mugla, Turkey, to be exact. Surprisingly, it took just seven days for this to arrive on my doorstep.

This is the LightAPRS Gateway 1.0 sold by QRP Labs, and I’ve posted my first impressions in LightAPRS Gateway 1.0 — First Impressions.

DAC for laptop and headphones

I like small, capable devices. And I like listening to music while I work, often with headphones rather than earbuds. My Surface Laptop 7 computer has a 3.5mm audio jack but not all of my computers are so equipped, so several months ago, I bought a USB-C digital audio converter:

Moondrop Echo-A 32Bit/384kHz Portable USB Type-C to Headphone DAC/AMP with 3.5mm Audio Jack Adapter (this is an affiliate link)

The current cost of the Moondrop DAC is $22 but when I bought it, it was on a deal for about one-half that. Does it work? Yes.

This week, I tried a newer, similar product, for $18:

USB C to 3.5mm Headphones Adapter, Dual Chip CX31993 MAX97220 DAC Dongle with HiFi Amplifier, 8-Strand 4N Single Crystal Copper Silver-Plated Cable, USBC to aux for All USBC Devices (this is an affiliate link)

I can’t actually tell the difference in sound between the two devices. Both work well to convert from USB-C to a 3.5mm headphone connection. They even work with my cell phone that has no headphone jack. Both sound great. Oh, and if you have an inline microphone with your headphones, both of these USB-C devices pass transmitted audio, too.

If you need separate lines for RX and TX, try this Creative Labs product for $19:

Creative Labs Sound Blaster Play! 3 External USB Sound Adapter for Windows and Mac. Plug and Play (No Drivers Required). Upgrade to 24-Bit 96Khz Playback (this is an affiliate link)

I have all three devices. They all work well.

USB Dongle Board

As I was digging through the parts drawer, I found a GeekWorm USB Dongle Board (this is an affiliate link) stuffed all the way in the back. Apparently, I bought it in 2025, mounted it to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, and then it migrated to the dark recesses of the drawer. The dongle costs $8.

What does it do? The Geekworm USB Dongle Board converts a Raspberry Pi Zero or Zero 2 W into a USB stick form factor by adding a full-size USB-A connector, allowing it to plug directly into any USB-A port. When configured for USB gadget mode, the Pi can present itself to the host computer as a network adapter, serial device, or keyboard — or it can simply draw power from the port while communicating wirelessly over WiFi.

I did not configure it in gadget mode. Instead, I have it plugged into my ORICO USB hub ($34, this is an affiliate link) where it is running as a utility Debian Linux machine over Wi-Fi on my home network.

My first test? Install uCareSystem to automate system updates. Unfortunately, OpenPGP verification failed, and the alternative methods to install the key also failed. The good news? I didn’t impact one of my working systems with this test!

07 Opinion: Just Read the Manual

For years, I’ve been seeing the same response when someone asks a question about how to operate a specific feature of an amateur radio: just read the manual. I saw it again this week when someone on Facebook asked a question I didn’t know the answer to — despite having read the manual myself, more than once.

It used to be easier. Fewer configuration choices meant the radio had buttons and dials instead of deeply nested menus. Manuals were logically organized and clearly written. Those days are largely gone, at least for the handheld transceivers that arrive at my door from distant lands.

Today, the manual is often poorly written in English — sometimes a translation, sometimes written by someone whose language skills don’t quite meet the demands of clear technical writing. And since many of us are now above a certain age, our memory may not retain information the way it once did. I recognize that the sponge in my head is simply not as absorbent as it used to be.

So there are three real problems with “just read the manual” advice: manuals that are poorly organized — or in the case of at least one radio brand I’ve wrestled with, nonexistent; English that isn’t up to the task of technical guidance; and the perfectly normal fact that human memory fades over time.

Telling someone to “just read the manual” solves nothing. I don’t think the people who say it realize how they come across to others.

The good news is that they're easy to ignore — and doing so leaves more room to appreciate the hams who genuinely want to help others learn. That community is larger, and it's the one I choose to spend my time with.

08 Short Stack of Internet Finds

There’s just not a lot for the Short Stack this week, which is a surprise, considering Amazon Prime Day sales and Field Day events.

Radio

• SwR Shortwave Radio: A New Android App for Listening to Public Online Shortwave Receivers — “This is an Android-only app that lets users easily listen to KiwiSDR and Web-888 receivers. The app appears to be free, with no in-app purchases.”

• The Ultimate Handheld Walkie-Talkie Guide for Amateur Radio Beginners — “This comprehensive guide breaks down how to choose your first HT, why more functions cost more money, the best upgrades for portable operation, and the top brands dominating the global market.”

Software

• DokuWiki Markdown Support — This may only matter to me, but… DokuWiki is a flat-file wiki system that I truly love. Except for the DokuWiki editor which does not match standard Markdown formatting. It looks like Markdown support will soon be baked into the core, and I think this is a tremendous thing.

09 QRT: End Transmission

I began crafting Random Wire 188 on Sunday, June 21: Father’s Day. It was a bittersweet moment as I recalled my father who walked on some years ago. This week, I replaced the mailbox Dad put up by the road oh, about 20 years ago. The metal bracket had become weakened due to rust and the wooden bits had grown quite soft. Frankly, I’m surprised the postal delivery person didn’t complain. It was a rickety thing.

But what I found endearing as I deconstructed Dad’s construction were the several generations of fixes Dad had implemented. I could see the first installation: a couple of lag bolts to secure the bracket to the 4x4 post and a couple of machine bolts to hold the mailbox to the bracket. And then there was a plywood bracket he added as the lag bolts lost their purchase, apparently to try to stabilize the main bracket. Finally, there were several applications of deck screws, inserted at various angles, to hold things together as the whole assembly began to weaken.

He would have installed the mailbox around age 70. As he and the mailbox aged, his reasoning got softer just as the mailbox support system did. I could see that by how he tried to use deck screws — probably in his 80s — to hold it all together. As I removed Dad’s work and replaced it with my own, I felt very close to him. Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

Walter Cronkite has been a silent key since 2009, so there is now an entire generation who know nothing about him…but I remember him. I remember his calm demeanor. I remember the feeling that this is someone who is telling me the truth. And I remember the origin story of Cronkite becoming a licensed ham. This strongly influenced my decision to seek my license, so Random Wire 187 opens with a thank you to Walter Cronkite KB2GSD (SK).

RW 187 also brings you:

• Four new EtherHam articles

• Some shack notes

• An APRS device I ordered

• The ARRL radio comparison table

• A new music player on my network-attached storage box

• Some gadgets (headphones and USB hubs)

• My Panasonic CF-54 ToughBook needs a battery

• An opinion piece about using AI as an assistive tool for hams that need some help

• And the Short Stack of Interesting Internet Finds

01 Thank You, Walter Cronkite KB2GSD (SK)

Walter Cronkite was born on November 4, 1916 in St. Joseph, Missouri. His family later moved to Texas, where he spent most of his childhood, and his passion for journalism ignited when he read an article in Boys’ Life as a young boy. He enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin to study political science, economics, and journalism, but left school to take a position at the Houston Post — and never looked back.

His career accelerated during his time at the United Press, where he served as a World War II correspondent and afterward as Chief Correspondent for the Nuremberg trials. He joined CBS News in 1950 and was named anchor of the CBS Evening News in 1962. The defining moment that made him a household name was his announcement of President Kennedy’s assassination. Over nearly two decades behind that desk, he was the calm, steady voice that walked Americans through the moon landing, Vietnam, Watergate, and a string of national tragedies that might have broken lesser men.

He is the last news anchor I fully trusted, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. There was something in his delivery — no spin, no wink, no performance. He became something of a national institution, known as “Uncle Walter” to many, with an unflappable delivery and a voice that guided viewers through national triumphs and tragedies alike. On March 6, 1981, he anchored his final newscast and signed off with: “Old anchormen, you see, don’t fade away, they just keep coming back for more. And that’s the way it is.” For me, the world felt a little less reliable after that.

Now here’s the part that matters to us. At CBS, Cronkite was surrounded by hams — most notably his friend and the program’s radio engineer, Steve Mendelsohn, W2ML, who over time talked about the hobby often enough to ignite a slow-burning interest in his news anchor friend. Cronkite had even purchased a receiver and would listen on the bands from time to time, but he resisted taking the licensing exam because of the Morse code requirement.

The breakthrough came in the studio one evening before the nightly broadcast, when Mendelsohn needed to test the tone of the audio recorders. He grabbed a copy of the New York Times and sent Morse code with the tone key for ten minutes. After the broadcast, Cronkite walked into the control room and presented his script — on the back of it was the entire text Mendelsohn had sent in code. Mendelsohn and CBS Evening News Director Dick Muller, WA2DOS, exchanged a look and told Cronkite he had just passed the Morse code test. Cronkite laughed and asked when the formal exam was scheduled — only to learn that with two licensed general class operators present as witnesses, he had already passed.

Weeks later Cronkite took and passed the written test, and became officially licensed as KB2GSD. His first QSO was on 10 meters. He was immediately snubbed by a Midwestern ham who didn’t believe the famous newscaster was who he claimed to be: “That’s the worst Walter Cronkite imitation I’ve ever heard!” followed by, “Walter Cronkite is not even a ham, and if he was, he certainly wouldn’t be here on 10 meters.” Mendelsohn said the two of them laughed about that one for weeks. Walter Cronkite, KB2GSD, passed away on July 17, 2009 at the age of 92 — but this story of hams helping others become licensed is exactly the kind of thing that makes this hobby worth thanking people for.

02 New on EtherHam

• After Elwood: A Survey of HamClock Successors and Alternatives — I take a look at the variety of HamClock-like systems available and manage to extend appreciation for Elwood Downey’s great contributions to our hobby.

• Getting the Arduino UNO Q Running Headless with Remote Desktop — This is cutting-edge stuff for me and I’m enjoying it. The Q has been running quite well for a week. Since I booted it up, I’ve also learned you can run WSJT-X and GridTracker on it! I’ve not tried that…yet.

• One Step Better: The Gamma 601 and the Bitaxe Firmware Underneath — The key takeaway: for three times the cost of the lightweight Nerd Miner, I’m getting 1,000 times more hashing.

• Weekly Report: June 18, 2026 — Band Conditions This Week, Digital Radio News, and the Groups.io Digest.

03 Radios

“Touch a radio every day!” is my closing tagline for this newsletter. I certainly did that this week. I organized the chargers for various handhelds:

• BTECH UV-PRO

• Wouxon KG-UV9D Plus

• Yaesu FT-3D and Yaesu FT-5D

• Connect Systems CS 7000-M17 Plus

• Baofeng UV-5R Mini

• Various TIDRADIO handhelds

I discovered that when I rebuilt the hotspot I use for YSF/C4FM, I changed the frequency. Rather than revert to the old frequency, I chose to manually reprogram two radios. I got the FT-3D configured with split TX and RX frequencies but have not completed that task with the FT-5D radio.

While I was doing these things, I was listening to our local C4FM repeater, to the W6EK repeater, to America’s Kansas City Wide network, and to the ISS. These regular stops provide good company all week. I also participated in the weekly M17 net held every Saturday on KC-Wide; I always learn new things there.

A radio friend asked for help so I spent some time testing an installation package for a radio system. Yes, I’m being a little cagey here because this package is not yet ready for prime time, but it is coming along very nicely. I’ll have more on this in a future issue.

On the HF side, I started organizing my HF rigs, too. I brought multiple Ten-Tec Scout radios with me to the lake house to test and haven’t had time to try them. My tried-and-true Yaesu FT-450D is in a Pelican-brand case next to my desk. The Icom IC-7300 MK2 is in my wife’s room. The other radios are in Harbor Freight cases, ready to be shifted to the garage.

04 APRS

I’ve been wanting to stand up a small fill-in digipeater, but I rarely have a lot of time to dig into projects like this. That’s why I was very pleased to see the LightAPRS Gateway by QRP Labs. I have one on order and am looking forward to getting it on the air.

Since I’m using my sister’s lake house right now, I can’t really drill holes in the wall to pass coax through. However, there are a few unused TV cable pass-throughs available. I have the bits and pieces coming to run coax from the galvanized chimney cap to a TV pass-through. While I know the TV F-connector and cable have 75-ohm impedance and we want 50 ohms, I don’t think it is going to make a lot of difference for this application.

What will make a difference is getting a good mag-mount above the roofline with a reasonable metal ground plane under it.

Maybe this will work fine, maybe it won’t. As is my way, I’ll try it and let you know how it goes.

05 ARRL Radio Comparison Table

This may be useful for radio amateurs: Find the Right Rig: New Comparison Tool for ARRL Members.

In the screenshot below, I tested by selecting handheld VHF/UHF radios with APRS capability:

As you can see, there are a number of well-known APRS-capable radios missing from the list, including the Kenwood TH-D74/75 radios. Why? Because the database only covers radios tested by ARRL. If a radio wasn’t tested, it’s not in the database.

Testing by the ARRL is generally thorough, so if a radio is listed, you can have confidence in the summarized results and the detailed review of the device. If a radio is not listed, that does not mean it performs poorly — it just means ARRL hasn’t reviewed it yet.

06 New Music Player for the NAS

I got tired of the OwnTone interface — slow, clunky, and not particularly friendly. This week, I installed Navidrome, an open source music player/streamer. It is working quite nicely. Fingers crossed that it continues to do so.

I could have installed it in a Docker container, but there was no good reason to do so. Instead, I followed the Linux installation instructions to install it directly on the Beelink network-attached storage box. All went well and the interface looks very nice:

There are a variety of client applications for iOS, macOS, Android, Linux, and Windows that can pull from the Navidrome instance. It’s nice to have choices.

I’ve kept OwnTone for now because I have some audiobooks in it. In the meantime, I’ve installed AudioBookShelf as a potential replacement.

07 Gadgets

Headphones

I’m always on the lookout for comfortable headphones that sound good. I’m not an audiophile — my hearing is no longer good enough to hear the very highest notes. I’m also not a bass head, so that opens up possibilities with off brands.

I am pleasantly surprised by a pair of wired headphones that arrived this week:

NUBWO Studio Monitor Headphones, Hi-Res Wired Over Ear Headphones with 1/4 inch to 3.5mm Jack, 45mm Drivers, Professional DJ Headphones for Piano Guitar APM Recording Mixing-HD01 (Black) (this is an affiliate link)

They sound pretty good. I got them on a deal for $50 and so far, I think they are worth more than that. They are comfortable on my head and ears, and the sound is crisp and clear. These headphones come with two cables.

At this price point, long-term durability is always a question. Nevertheless, I like them. My test? Listening to The Ultimate Yes, a three-disc album set. I’m pushing the volume and not encountering distortion. If you are a Yes fan, you know the bass work is exceptional, and while the bass is probably a little light for some folks, I find it just right. The sound has some sparkle in the upper registers, I can clearly hear the bass line, and the mid-range is ample.

Even Nickelback and the Bee Gees sound good with these phones.

USB Hubs

I bought two USB hubs, one for the Arduino Uno Q and one for my desk. The UGREEN hub I bought for the Q did not work for me, but this Acer model did:

acer 6 in 1 USB C Hub with Ethernet, 4K@60Hz USBC to HDMI Multiport Adapter, 100W PD Charging, USB A/USB C Data Ports USB C Splitter for MacBook Neo/Pro M5/Air, Acer, iPad, iPhone 17/16/15 (this is an affiliate link)

The UGREEN got quite warm when it was connected to Ethernet but the Acer 6-in-1 hub is staying nice and cool. More important for me is I’m able to pass data and power through the single USB-C port on the Q. Also, the Acer hub is about the size of my Roku remote control, meaning it doesn’t take up much real estate on the desk.

The other hub I picked up for the edge of the shelves beside my desk.

ORICO Clip Docking Station, 8-in-1 Clamp USB C Hub with 4K@60Hz HDMI, 100W PD, Gigabit Ethernet, 4xUSB Port, AUX, 10Gbps Clamp Docking Station for Laptop, MacBook, PC (Adapter Not Included) (this is an affiliate link)

This device clamps onto the edge of a shelf where it stays close at hand but still out of the way. Unlike many other hubs, this device features a variety of ports. Very handy.

08 My Panasonic ToughBook CF-54

I picked this up a few years ago, finding it to be a solid — if unspectacular — performer. However, the batteries (yes, there are two) are not holding a charge for very long. When I pulled them, I saw they are Panasonic-brand batteries which means they are probably original to this ruggedized laptop.

Time to go shopping.

Buying specialized batteries online can be a hit-or-miss proposition. In this case, I headed to Amazon and started looking at reviews. I found the reviews not entirely helpful. It feels like there is a lot of gaming of the system going on when it comes to battery reviews.

Eventually, I picked one that had a very large number of reviews. It wasn't the highest-rated battery, but a large review count feels more trustworthy than a handful of five-star ratings.

I had one other surprise with the CF-54. With nice weather, I like to take a laptop or tablet out on the deck from time to time. My Kindle Paperwhite works brilliantly in the sunshine, but my laptops become very hard to see due to insufficient nits (brightness) and their highly reflective screens. Then I tried the CF-54 in full sunlight and was shocked at how well it performed, once I turned the screen brightness up. Of course, this consumes a lot of battery power, which is why (and now the story comes full circle) I need a new battery!

09 Keeping Every Ham at the Table

A friend of mine has some special needs that make conventional computer use difficult. Thinking about his situation in the wake of setting up a self-hosted AI agent on my home server, I realized: this could open a door for him that other technologies have kept closed. The agent can speak, listen, remember, and respond — offering an alternative path around the screen and keyboard entirely. That thought led to a bigger one: how many hams are in situations like his, and are we paying any attention to what technology like this could mean for them?

Here’s the thing: you’ve probably already worked someone over the air who has significant special needs. You didn’t know, because they were smooth. They had figured out how to do what the rest of us unthinkingly do, just by a different route. That legally blind net control operator running a clean, efficient session. The ham with tremor who has adapted their keying. The operator whose memory isn’t what it was but whose passion for the hobby hasn’t dimmed one bit. They’re already in our community. They’re already on our repeaters. And most of us have no idea.

We don’t talk much about accessibility in the amateur radio community, but we should. The demographics of our hobby are skewing older. A significant portion of licensed amateurs are in their post-retirement years, and with age comes a familiar constellation of challenges you’ll hear on many repeaters: vision changes, arthritis, tremor, hearing loss, cognitive shifts. These are not reasons to leave the hobby. They’re reasons to think harder about the tools we use and the tools we build. Organizations like Blind Hams (blindhams.network) and BlindHams.com have been doing this work quietly for years. The conversation is not new. What’s new is what technology now makes possible.

What I’ve been experimenting with is called an AI agent. Specifically, I’m trying Hermes Agent, an open-source project from Nous Research. Unlike the chatbots most people are familiar with, an agent is persistent — it remembers what it learned. It can be given tasks and then carry them out autonomously. And critically, it doesn’t have to live in a browser tab on a bright screen. It can live on a server in your shack, accessible through a phone, a voice interface, or a messaging app. I've not seen it examined anywhere. Who has explored what this kind of tool could mean for operators with special needs? That gap is what this piece is trying to close.

That last point is where accessibility enters the picture in a new way. One of the most interesting configurations I’ve been contemplating pairs the agent with Telegram, a messaging platform available on any smartphone. With that connection in place, a ham could interact with an AI agent entirely through voice messages. Speak your question into your phone; the agent transcribes it, thinks it through, and speaks the answer back. No keyboard. No screen that needs to be read carefully. No bright display in a dark room. On the other side of the microphone, you’d never guess the radio operator had any difficulty because the tools help instead of hinder.

The applications practically write themselves. Imagine an agent that knows your callsign, your equipment, and your operating habits: one that can tell you current band conditions, look up a frequency, summarize what’s happening on a net, or walk you through a procedure step by step in plain language. For someone with macular degeneration, that’s not just a convenience. It’s the difference between staying active in the hobby and stepping back from it. For someone with arthritic hands who finds typing painful, a voice-commanded assistant could dramatically change the calculus of using a radio and logging contacts.

Dexterity issues affect more hams than we acknowledge. Essential tremor, post-stroke motor changes, the simple stiffening that comes with decades of living: these make keying harder, tuning harder, and interacting with software harder. An AI agent that responds to voice, that can look things up and report back, that doesn’t require precise finger movements on a keyboard, addresses a real need we rarely discuss. The hams managing these challenges mostly figure it out on their own, quietly, without asking for help. We could be doing better by them.

Cognitive support is another frontier worth taking seriously. Early-stage memory changes are more common than people let on, and they don’t disqualify someone from enjoying the hobby they’ve spent decades building. An agent with persistent memory, one that knows your station, your typical contacts, your preferences, can serve as a patient, non-judgmental assistant that helps fill in the gaps without any stigma attached.

The self-hosted dimension matters here too. Many hams in this demographic are rightly cautious about privacy, about subscriptions, about depending on services that might change their terms or disappear. A self-hosted agent runs on hardware you own, on your local network, with no data leaving your house. It doesn’t require a monthly fee. It works when the internet goes down. These are not small things for someone on a fixed income who has learned, over a lifetime, to be skeptical of anything that requires a recurring payment and a Terms of Service agreement.

I don’t have a complete solution to offer yet. The Telegram voice interface I described is still in development on my end, and there’s real work ahead in making any of this genuinely accessible rather than just theoretically possible. What I have is a working experiment, a growing conviction that this is worth pursuing seriously, and a question for the community: who among us has thought about this? The AI tools now exist to make amateur radio more accessible in ways that weren’t previously possible.

The need is real, and the people who could benefit are already part of our community: running net control, logging contacts, maintaining repeaters, Elmering new hams, doing extra things we never have to think about, just to stay at the table. They deserve tools that make that easier. And the rest of us? We benefit, too. Those are experienced voices, hard-won skills, and decades of institutional memory. We are all made better when we keep the table full.

10 Short Stack: Interesting Internet Finds

Radio

• New Annual Verification process by RadioID.net — “Beginning July 1, 2026, RadioID.net will implement an annual verification process.”

• Beyond the Sunspots: Understanding 10 Meter Propagation — “…the dramatic differences we see between seasons on 10 meters are driven by complex changes in the Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and magnetic field.”

• Unbox the Affordable HamSpot 5 Digital Hotspot Today — “The HamSpot 5 is a notable innovation in the world of amateur radio, offering a versatile and affordable solution for digital voice communication.”

• Ham Radio: The Hobby of a Thousand Hobbies — I chuckled at this title because when I describe amateur radio to my friends, I call it a hobby of hobbies.

• BTECH FRS-A1 All-Purpose Walkie Talkies — Not all of our family members are licensed, so sometimes an FRS radio is the way to stay in touch. The selling point for me? USB-C charging.

• Comms Cards by Ready Radio — “Comms Cards are quick-reference guides for radios that give you instant access to frequencies, channel layouts, and key settings without needing an app, signal, or memory.”

M17

• LinHT Rev B status: what works, what broke, and why Rev C is next — “This post summarizes that progress. It starts with what Rev A proved, then goes through what we changed in Rev B, how we built the first boards, what worked during testing, what failed, and what we need to fix before Rev C.”

SDR

• SDR++ Setup Guide: How to Install and Configure SDR++ — “For years, SDR# (SDRSharp) was the default recommendation for most SDR enthusiasts. While SDR# remains extremely popular, many hobbyists have migrated to SDR++ because of its modern interface, excellent performance, and support for Windows, Linux, and macOS.”

• I Built My Own Flight Tracker with a Raspberry Pi — “For this project, I’m using the FlightAware Pro Stick Plus, which combines the filter, amplifier, and SDR receiver into one USB dongle. You plug it into the Raspberry Pi, connect an antenna, and install the software.”

Meshtastic

• Meshyface — “Meshyface is a chat-first Meshtastic dashboard that runs as a single Python service and serves a single-page web UI over HTTP.” As near as I can tell, it’s a web interface that shows the topology of a Meshtastic network.

AI

• How AI Is Changing Ham Radio (And What Operators Can Use Today) — “Artificial intelligence is rapidly finding its way into amateur radio, and many operators are already using AI-powered tools without realizing it.”

• Google’s Gemini-Enabled Home Speaker Is Officially Available for Preorder — “Google's chatbot is fully integrated into its newest smart speaker, known as the Google Home Speaker, and it's almost here: You can preorder it today for $99.99, and it will officially launch on Thursday, June 25.”

• I’ve tested so many desktop AI tools, but Hermes with Ollama is my new favorite - here’s why — “Local AI is the way to go, and Hermes with open-source Ollama is my preferred setup right now.”

11 KJ7T Shack Notes

• Using the Groups.io Digest script means I can eliminate a bunch of daily emails in my inbox! Find the script on GitHub.

• A subscriber made some needed corrections to my code in the HFWatch repo, and I appreciate those improvements.

• The Great Plains Super launch is gearing up for the weekend. Many balloons beaconing on APRS.

• I’ve been noticing more stations popping up on 6 meters in my HamClock display, so the “magic band” season must be upon us.

• When I started reading about Tailnet Lock for Tailscale users, I became quite interested…until I realized this is really an edge case that is unlikely to affect my use case. Shared here in case it lands for you.

• Internet failures are happening more frequently at the lake house than they have for several years, so I’m thinking about a low-cost cellular hotspot for resiliency.

• You may be aware of a service called Ham.live that allowed net control operators to also check in people over the internet and have side chats during radio nets. Well, Ham.live is going dark but the dev has released the code on GitHub. Want to run your own version? Now you can.

12 QRT: End Transmission

I did not get as much writing time in this week as I wanted. Instead, I spent last weekend preparing for a board of directors meeting for my state association — the one meeting each year I think of as The Most Important Meeting. Why important? Because the board debates and decides on our annual budget, and this year, we had to pull from reserves to balance the budget.

Why did it weigh on me so heavily? The state association exists to serve our 45 member districts, and they in turn deliver programs communities depend on. When the association hits a budget speed bump at the same moment state agencies are being squeezed, the ripple effects are real. That's the context — and it's why I didn't sleep much last weekend.

The good news? My board adopted the budget as proposed. The bad news? We know we’ll have a tremendously difficult challenge next January, so we’re going to be investing a lot of time and energy preparing for that. Making this even more complicated is the turnover in the state legislature — we won’t know until early November who will be representing Washington State citizens when the Legislature convenes in January.

Fortunately, I have a lot of radio things and thoughts to keep my mind busy. Thank you for sharing this journey, and as always, please let me know your ideas and feedback. Without you, there would be no Random Wire newsletter or EtherHam.com website.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

But those marker moments are also cause for reflection, and some of my ruminations spilled over into the amateur radio realm. The first piece in this issue of the Random Wire is about where AI is taking our hobby: The Machine Learns to Listen. The second piece is about re-centering the Random Wire and EtherHam, and seeking feedback: The Journal and the Workbench.

As a fun diversion, I wrote up how to use a small ESP32-powered device to mine for Bitcoin: Playing the Bitcoin Lottery at Home. The crossover with amateur radio? Learning about ESP32 devices in general. The ESP32 is everywhere in the maker/IoT world. I’m hoping the Bitcoin article will give hams a friendly on-ramp through something as immediately tangible as "plug it in and it does a thing." Bitcoin lottery mining is probably the most motivating possible introduction to the platform — much more fun than blinking an LED. I expect to be learning, and sharing, about the ESP32 platform in future issues.

I also did some Python coding to pull recent topics from a variety of Groups.io conversations into a one-page summary: Groups.io Digest with Python. I already learned something new from making it easier to harvest this information.

Yesterday, I went looking for a traffic reporter for YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X, and that took me to a place of realization I didn’t quite expect. The full piece is on EtherHam at Walled Gardens and Unlabeled Mazes: Why C4FM Users Can’t Find Each Other.

And I fiddled with some radios and added a fan to a Raspberry Pi 4-based AllStar node. Nothing special, but certainly enjoyable. Lots of projects on the bench to work on, including an Arduino Uno Q board — I’m really looking forward to playing with this platform. It has 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC storage for just $59. Fingers crossed.

The bench didn't slow down just because I was feeling reflective. Let’s dive into the Random Wire topics for this week!

A Thank You Long Overdue

Some tools become so woven into how you operate that you stop noticing them. APRS is like that for me. The little icons moving across a map, a beacon confirming a friend made it over the pass, a weather object appearing before the storm does — it’s just part of the fabric of how I think about being on the air. My Yaesu FTM-300DR radio in the pickup truck runs APRS automatically.

None of that would exist without Bob Bruninga, WB4APR (SK).

APRS traces back to 1982, when Bruninga wrote his first data map program to plot the positions of U.S. Navy ships on an Apple II computer. A few years later he was running packet communications on a VIC-20 and C-64 to support an endurance race. By 1988 the program had moved to the IBM PC, and in 1992 it got the name we know: APRS. He kept pushing it — not just as a position reporting system but as a live tactical picture of whatever a community of operators needed to share.

Bob was a retired U.S. Naval Academy senior research engineer who never seemed to retire from the work that mattered. He founded the Appalachian Trail Golden Packet event, fielding APRS nodes from Stone Mountain in Georgia all the way to Mount Katahdin in Maine every July. He wrote. He answered questions. He kept the vision alive long after he could have handed it off and walked away.

Bob passed away on February 7, 2022, at age 73, after a battle with cancer complicated by COVID-19. His key is silent now. The network he built is not.

I’m lucky to know someone who carries that tradition forward locally. Herb, KB7UVC, is one of those hams who has forgotten more about APRS than most of us will ever learn — and who will actually sit down with you and work through a problem until it makes sense.

So: thank you, Bob. Thank you, Herb. APRS may mean “automatic” but I know the work to build and support APRS has been anything but.

This "thank you" section is a weekly feature to share my gratitude and appreciation for radio amateurs that have helped make my journey more enjoyable.

The Machine Learns to Listen

Those of us who came up turning dials have watched amateur radio change beneath our hands. The rigs got quieter, then smarter, then started doing things we couldn’t do ourselves. I’ve been thinking about that arc lately — from the glow of a tube radio warming up, to FT8 pulling signals out of noise I couldn’t hear, to what comes next.

Because something is coming next. Machine learning is already reshaping weak-signal decoding and interference rejection. Further out are transceivers that model your RF environment and learn your operating patterns over time — not radios that operate themselves, but genuinely intelligent partners. The hardware headroom already exists. This is a software problem now.

I wrote a longer piece about all of this over at EtherHam — where the arc came from, where it appears to be going, and what I think the real question is for our hobby as AI starts showing up in high-end rigs. If you’ve ever felt the particular unease of watching a machine exceed your capabilities, or wondered whether the vintage operators and the SDR experimenters are in conflict or in conversation, I think you’ll find it worth the read. See: The Machine Learns to Listen.

Exciting News: M17 Audio Over RF

Jeff AE5ME posted this YouTube video early this week about using Greg W5GGW’s M17 app on iOS with a Mobilnkd TNC4 to send M17 audio over RF, and to receive it in the app from an RF signal. This is a great moment for M17!

This nine-minute video describes and demonstrates how to configure the M17 app and the TNC4 to send and receive over-the-air M17 audio.

Jeff’s video was also picked up by the M17 Project.

The Journal and the Workbench

I started writing the Random Wire because I wanted to capture what I was doing so I didn’t have to relearn it later. I had been keeping project notes and a radio friend suggested I publish what I was working on because “other hams are having the same problems.” So I did, and I named this journal of my amateur radio explorations the Random Wire newsletter.

As time went on, the articles got longer and more detailed. Deep dives with plenty of workbench-level detail. Some of them amount to A-to-Z how-to guides. At some point I realized I was writing two different kinds of things: a journal of what I was experiencing, and a workbench record of what I actually did and learned. That’s when EtherHam was born.

The Random Wire is the journal. EtherHam is the workbench.

Everything published on both platforms comes from direct personal experience. I built it, or it broke and I fixed it, or I tried something and it didn’t work the way I expected. The knowledge sitting in my head does nobody any good if I don’t share it — and whatever problem I just solved, someone else has already hit that same wall, probably at 11pm with their soldering iron in hand.

This split in style is not a true dichotomy because the two often overlap. You can’t really separate what you are experiencing from what you are doing. But they come at the same territory from different directions, and I think of them as a complementary pairing rather than competing platforms.

Along the way, I added sections to the Random Wire — band conditions, radio history, a digital news digest — that felt like things a newsletter should have rather than things that naturally belonged here. Good content, wrong home. I’m moving those sections to EtherHam where focused reference material belongs, and the Random Wire goes back to being what it started as: a craftsman's journal, written at the end of a week at the workbench.

I wish I knew more precisely how subscribers and readers perceive these two platforms. The available metrics are genuinely useless unless you think total subscribers or page hits tell you something meaningful. I don’t. What matters to me is hearing from you that something I wrote was useful, or saved you an evening of frustration, or pointed you somewhere worth going. That’s the whole measure of success here.

So here's what I'd genuinely like to know: when something I've written has been useful to you, what kind of article was it? A build walkthrough? A troubleshooting story? A short take on something new? Tell me in the comments or drop me a note. That feedback helps shape what lands on the workbench next.

Leave a comment

TIDRADIO TD-H9: More

Since I’ve always had good luck with programming software and cables from RT Systems, I ordered their programmer and special cable for the TIDRADIO TD-H9. I have two TD-H9 radios. One will probably be largely devoted to APRS work. The other will be for general analog use. Being able to program them both with one program and one cable will be efficient.

The RT Systems package arrived and I loaded up the programmer on my old ToughBook. However, I was taken aback by the sparseness of the programming interface. I had hoped to be able to configure other aspects of the radio, such as APRS beaconing, through the programmer. I’m not seeing where to accomplish that from within the RT Systems software. This means that to get the radio working correctly for you, you’ll still need to dive into the radio menus through the front keypad.

It’s easy to enter a frequency, specify whether it is simplex or a repeater frequency with an offset, and set the power level. That is truly more convenient than wading through the menus in the radio. But if you want to enable GPS, turn APRS on or off, and enable beaconing, you’re stuck doing that directly on the radio.

I don’t regret buying the RT Systems package for the TIDRADIO TD-H9 radio. It works brilliantly for what it is. But I wish it did more than just the basics of frequencies, channels, offsets, and power level.

Groups.io Digest with Python

I monitor a lot of Groups.io mailing lists — ARDC, PNW DMR, LinuxHam, TinySA, and a bunch of others — and I got tired of checking them one at a time. So I built a Python script that does it for me. When I want to catch up, it hits the Groups.io API, pulls recent activity from every group on my list, and generates a digest report that opens in my browser with everything ranked by activity and every thread title linked directly to the discussion. It took longer to figure out the API quirks than to write the script, but the result is exactly what I wanted.

The script is free, requires no external Python libraries, and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. I wrote it up in detail on EtherHam — including how to handle subgroups, restricted groups, and scheduling it to run automatically every morning. Grab it at etherham.com or directly from the EtherHamRadio GitHub repo (and thank you to the subscribers who urged me to set up a GitHub space for code like this).

Listening to W6EK on Baofeng UV-5R Mini

While grinding up my wife’s morning meds, I grabbed the Baofeng UV-5R Mini transceiver to listen to traffic on the W6EK repeater. I never thought I’d say that I like a Baofeng radio…but I do like this one. It sounds fine, it slips easily into a pocket, and is just a very convenient package to use:

BAOFENG UV-5R Mini Ham Radio Long Range Handheld Two Way Radio, Bluetooth APP Programming Walkie Talkies 2 Pack, 999CH One-Key Copy Frequency, NOAA Weather, USB-C Charging, Dual-Band, Green (affiliate link)

I added a stubby antenna to make it even more convenient at home:

ABBREE Ham Radio Antenna Dual Band VHF/UHF 144/430Mhz 1.96inch AR-805S SMA- Female Long Range Stubby Short Antenna for Baofeng UV-5R Mini 5RM BF-F8HP PRO, K5 Plus, DM32, UV32 Radio Accessories, 2 Pack (affiliate link)

In this photo, the radio is sitting on the kitchen stove while I listen to the W6EK repeater through my AllScan ANF101 node that is transmitting to the Baofeng.

Later, while finishing this section, I listened to ASL node 516221 which carries ISS radio traffic, passing through my local ASL node 588418.

I shared my first impressions of the tiny UV-5R Mini back in February. I continue to be surprised at how much I like this little transceiver.

B.B. Link Adapter: Last Chance

If you use an iPhone or iPad and have a Kenwood TH-D74 or D75A transceiver, this alert may be for you. Georges WH6AZ reached out to me last week with an aloha and a note about the last stock of his B.B. Link adapter.

Meet B.B. Link, the adapter that allows iPhones and iPads to connect to Kenwood TH-D75 and D74 radios via Bluetooth. iOS devices, which are limited to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), can't pair natively with these radios. With this adapter, iOS applications like RadioMail can access the radio's built-in KISS TNC packet modem for off-grid communication. Simply plug the adapter into a USB-C port for power, turn your radio on, and you're set.

Georges authored Transceive, an AllStar app I use on my iMac. Transceive received a rare Random Wire Recommended sticker from me. I like Transceive.

His B.B. Link product is reaching the end of its production run and he does not plan another run. He writes:

Nearly two years ago, I introduced the B.B. Link, an adapter that allowed apps like RadioMail, Packet Commander, and now Radio Messenger to use the built-in packet TNC of the Kenwood TH-D74 and TH-D75 radios. At the time, iPhone-friendly ham radio interfaces were scarce, and B.B. Link filled a real need.

The landscape has evolved. We now have capable audio adapter options such as the Digirig Lite and AIOC, which let software modems interface over audio directly. We also have reasonably priced HT radios like the UV-PRO and VG-N76 that expose their TNCs over BLE.

I hope radio manufacturers continue this trend and ensure future hardware exposes a TNC, or at least a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi–accessible audio interface, so more people can participate with less friction.

I never set out to become a hardware maker. I built the first prototype for myself and hoped I might sell the initial batch of 100 to recoup my cost. Demand far exceeded that, and I’ve been humbled by the reception.

But B.B. Link has always been a handcrafted project. Managing supply chain challenges, tariffs, assembly, testing, order fulfillment, and support has been meaningful work, but also time consuming. It’s time for me to reclaim that bandwidth and focus fully on software development, where I can deliver the most impact for the community.

With that in mind, B.B. Link availability will end once the current batch sells out. I expect most who want one already have it, but if you need a spare (or know someone who would) now is the moment.

The firmware remains open source for anyone who wants to build their own DIY version.

If you use an iPhone or iPad and have a Kenwood TH-D74/D75 radio platform, this is a “last chance” notice to get a useful tool that eases access to the TNC in those radios. I do have a TH-D74A so this notice applies to me, too!

Playing the Bitcoin Lottery at Home

A friend of mine has been running a tiny Bitcoin miner on her home network for the better part of a year. She knows — with complete mathematical certainty — that she is almost certainly never going to find a block. She does it anyway. “It’s the cheapest lottery ticket I’ve ever bought,” she told me, “and it never expires.” That was enough to get me curious.

The device is called a NerdMiner — an ESP32 microcontroller running open-source firmware called NMMiner — available on Amazon for around $22. It draws a fraction of a watt, connects to your WiFi, and quietly submits hashes to a solo Bitcoin mining pool around the clock. Your odds of finding a block are approximately those of winning the Powerball. But the hardware costs less than a tank of gas and runs indefinitely on any USB charger, so the ongoing cost is a few cents a day.

Setting one up is more involved than plugging it in — the shipped firmware is out of date, there’s a specific pool configuration that actually works for low-powered devices, and there’s one bootloader quirk that will stop you cold if you don’t know about it. I’ve written up the complete walkthrough, including the COM port gotcha that would have saved me time if I’d known it going in.

If the idea of a perpetual lottery ticket running quietly on your shelf sounds like your kind of thing, the full article is at EtherHam.com.

Added a Fan to the RPi4 AllStar Node

My AllStar node 588410, built on a Raspberry Pi 4 platform with an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) hat, was running rather warm. Not the 80°C temperature where the SoC (system on a chip) begins to self-throttle, but much warmer than I liked.

I bought a very inexpensive 30mm fan from Pi-Shop that was made to fit my tall RPi4 case. It fit perfectly. Even though it is a 5-volt fan, I powered it from a 3.3V GPIO pin on the hat. Why? Because the fan runs slower at 3.3V, and slower means quieter. It is running silently and doing a good job of bringing the 60°C temps down to the mid 40°C range: quite acceptable.

I’m happy with this small addition to the package. Node 588410 now has the RPi4 and UPS and cooling fan inside a single case.

During this journey, I learned of a useful alternative to the Enhanced Parrot node 55553, and that is AllStar node 2002. I knew this but had forgotten it until I read this in the SHARI Groups.io group: “…call Allstarlink node 2002, which is a parrot that has a built-in IAX ping diagnostic. If after you connect, it comes back and says ‘your node is unreachable’, then either your port is not forwarded correctly, or something upstream is blocking incoming packets to that port, i.e., CG-NAT.” Node 2002 provides useful information, whether you are testing the accessibility of your node or just checking your transmitted audio volume.

Walled Gardens and Unlabeled Mazes: Why C4FM Users Can't Find Each Other

If you’ve ever keyed up on a WiRES-X room and heard nothing but silence, you’re not alone — and you’re not doing anything wrong. The problem isn’t your radio or your node. It’s that the C4FM ecosystem was never built to help you find where the conversation is happening. This week on EtherHam I went looking for the monitoring tools that should exist for YSF and WiRES-X users — the kind DMR and AllStarLink operators take for granted — and what I found was a more interesting story than I expected.

It turns out open protocols don’t automatically produce open, navigable ecosystems. Somebody still has to build the town square. WiRES-X and YSF aren’t just two names for the same thing — they’re two fundamentally different systems with different governance, different infrastructure, and different reasons why the tools that would make them navigable never got built. One is a classic corporate walled garden. The other is something stranger: an open protocol that the community never quite organized around…but still could.

The full piece is on EtherHam. It gets into why this happened, what partial solutions exist, and whether it’s fixable. Spoiler: one side of that answer is more hopeful than the other.

Weekly Reports Moved to EtherHam

I’ve moved the Band Conditions, Digital Radio News, and Groups.io Digest reports to the EtherHam website. This week’s post is Weekly Report: June 11, 2026.

I’ll use the same header image as shown here for each weekly report. That will make it easier to key in on this regular informational feature. In general, I run my routines once a week, on Thursday, for publication by Friday morning.

Short Stack

APRS

• LightAPRS Gateway 1.0: A Standalone APRS Digipeater and iGate in a Small Box — $130 for a standalone digi and igate!

• Build a Low-Power APRS Station with Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W — “Building a low-power APRS station using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W…a comprehensive guide on setting up Graywolf on Tixie OS Lite, allowing you to operate a compact and efficient APRS station or digipeater.”

• Radio Messenger Is What Ham Radio Chat Should Have Been All Along — “Radio Messenger is a new iPhone and iPad app that…takes the underlying technology of APRS – the same open amateur radio protocol that’s been quietly running on VHF frequencies worldwide – and wraps it in a messaging interface that looks and feels like a chat app.”

• APRSdroid NA7Q Edition: The Most Feature-Rich APRS Client for Android — “While the official APRSdroid project remains a popular choice, the NA7Q Edition takes the application significantly further.”

Shortwave

• Tecsun PL-520: An Excellent Upgrade — I don’t find this nicely reviewed radio in stock on Amazon. Apparently, “stock fluctuates.”

Windows

• This 20-year-old Windows tool fixed my dead PC when nothing else would — I’d forgotten about Hiren’s, but I’ve used it in the past few years. When I look through my collection of saved USB sticks, I see one labeled: Hiren’s. “If you're an oldhead like me, you probably know all about Hiren's BootCD, but it's one of the most useful tools anyone can have handy.”

AI

• I’ve tested so many desktop AI tools, but Hermes with Ollama is my new favorite - here’s why — “Local AI is the way to go, and Hermes with open-source Ollama is my preferred setup right now.”

Support

Occasionally, I remind subscribers that supporting the Random Wire and EtherHam is very helpful. There are many ways to give support as described on the Support EtherHam page, should you choose to do so.

I’ve been trying to add a summer hat in time for Field Day but my EtherHam store is rejecting the custom embroidery for some reason. Looks like a nicely ventilated booney hat will have to wait until I get that sorted out.

As I noted several issues back, the location of the EtherHam logo on the Champion sweatshirt was not quite right. I adjusted it and the new location looks better.

Thank you to all who support the Random Wire and EtherHam. Support doesn’t mean you contributed money — it also means you subscribe and read and comment from time to time.

And who are EtherHams? We are. Since we all use computers in some aspect of our amateur radio activities, I think we are all EtherHams.

Home

I found a box of old compact discs in the closet. It’s a box of memories, really, of the many great times my wife and I shared with music. She was a music educator her entire working life, so music was ever-present in our lives. For many years, I also functioned as her roadie, setting up music concerts, repairing band instruments, and fixing amplifiers and wires. Those are great memories, both of helping my wife and of all of her great students.

Many of the CDs are so old they don’t have metadata encoded on the disc. When I rip the music to my network storage, it often shows up as Unknown Artist and Track 1, Track 2 instead of names, and doesn’t show any cover art.

To fix this, I started using Mp3tag to edit the metadata for tracks I’m saving on the new network-attached storage box. This is a bit time consuming, but it also lets me dwell a bit on the songs. (Lots and lots of memories!) After editing the metadata, I open the album in MusicBee and ask it to find the cover art…and it usually does. Then I re-scan my music folder on the NAS to add the album and named tracks to my music library.

But then I discovered a shortcut — I found I can rip CDs directly into MusicBee. The app does a good job of finding metadata and album cover art as part of that process. I rip the CD to my laptop, then copy the entire folder to my NAS drive and tell OwnTone to rescan my music library. Very easy.

Music really does touch the soul. When I listen to these songs, I’m remembering where we were, what we were talking about, how we were feeling. What’s more important is that these old songs evoke memories and emotions in my wife, despite her cognitive challenges. It’s truly amazing and I’m happy to help her experience such moments.

Right now? We’re listening to a two-disc collection of Tom Jones greatest hits. There are a ton of memories embedded in those tunes!

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

Welcome to Random Wire 185.

On the amateur radio side, I’m very pleased to share a positive outcome after a month of trying to get APRS beaconing working reliably on my TIDRADIO TD-H9 handheld transceiver. As is often the case with stubborn problems, the solution ended up being a simple on-off setting, but finding that took extensive trial-and-error testing. It's a small thing that felt like a very big thing when I finally cracked it

On the technology side, I’m also happy to share my new network-attached storage (NAS) solution using a Beelink ME Mini PC. It’s affordable, quick, and should be reliable. This project is well within reach of anyone who runs Linux on a computer, and it’s a great learning opportunity if you’re just getting started.

Find links to these below in the New on EtherHam section.

01 Thank You…America’s Kansas City Wide Network

This week’s thank-you goes to the team behind America’s Kansas City Wide Network — one of the most reliably busy watering holes on the digital amateur radio scene. Dedicated volunteers keep the lights on, and a very active group of regulars keeps it from ever getting too quiet.

I tune in when I travel. There’s a Portland repeater on the network, which means I can monitor and participate whenever I’m in range — a small thing that makes a long drive considerably more interesting. What I especially appreciate is that KCWide hasn’t stood pat. They’ve linked an M17 instance, extending a warm welcome to the new kid on the block. That kind of openness matters.

If you haven’t found your way to KCWide yet, consider this your invitation. Thank you to everyone who keeps it going.

02 New on EtherHam

It was a very satisfying week with several big wins.

The TIDRADIO TD-H9: A $70 APRS Radio Worth the Effort

The TIDRADIO TD-H9 offers 10 watts, VHF/UHF, AM airband, a built-in TNC, GPS, APRS, Bluetooth, and a spectrum analyzer for around $70. The hardware delivers on that promise. Getting APRS automatic beaconing to work reliably, however, took two radios, weeks of testing, packet log analysis, and a lot of time on aprs.fi. The culprit turned out to be an undocumented interaction between two settings — and once identified, it was a one-sentence fix. This is what I learned, so you don’t have to learn it the hard way.

The full writeup is on EtherHam: settings, firmware notes, real-world packet data, and more. Make the jump to Getting APRS Working on the TIDRADIO TD-H9 for the details.

An AllStar Node on the Seeed reRouter CM4

The Seeed Studio reRouter CM4 1432 is a compact mini-router built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 — and unlike standard Pi builds, it stores its operating system on onboard eMMC flash rather than a microSD card. For AllStar node builders who’ve lost a node to card corruption, that’s a compelling detail. This article walks through converting the reRouter from its factory OpenWRT installation to Raspberry Pi OS, installing ASL3 on Debian 13, and building a fully functional AllStar node — including UCI radio interface setup and thermal testing of the passive cooling system.

Read the complete article: An AllStar Node on the Seeed reRouter CM4.

Retiring the Pi 4: Building a Better Home NAS with the Beelink ME Mini

The Beelink ME Mini is a purpose-built NAS mini PC that competes directly with a Raspberry Pi 5 kit on price but wins decisively on performance, thermal design, and expandability. It ships with an Intel N150 processor, 16GB LPDDR5, a 1TB NVMe, dual 2.5GbE ports, and six M.2 slots — all in a compact enclosure with a substantial internal metal heatsink and a built-in power supply. If your Pi-based NAS is running out of steam, this is worth a serious look. Here’s my experience migrating a home NAS and OwnTone music server to this platform, running Debian 13 and OMV 8, including the gotchas worth knowing before you start.

Visit Upgrading the Home NAS: From Raspberry Pi 4 to Beelink ME Mini for more.

DroidStar IAX Still Broken — But the Fix Exists

DroidStar's IAX/AllStar connection mode stopped working for many users in early 2026 — the Connect button simply does nothing. This article traces the bug to its root cause, tests available prebuilt Android APKs, and then builds DroidStar from source on a Raspberry Pi 4 utility machine to confirm that the fix is real, the IAX handshake works, and the problem is that nobody has shipped a working Android build yet.

Learn more at DroidStar IAX Connections: Broken Builds, a Working Fix, and a Rabbit Hole Worth Falling Down.

03 Gadgets

USB Cable Tester

I got a little frustrated last week trying to find a USB-C cable that carried data. It seemed like every cable I pulled out of the box was a charge-only cable.

Time for a cable tester. I ordered this one, even though it requires the user to interpret the LED lights displayed when testing:

Treedix USB Cable Tester USB Cable Checker Data Wire Fast Detection for Type-C, USB-A 3.0, Micro-B 3.0, Micro-B 2.0, Mini-B 2.0, and for Lightning Cables by Checking the LEDs (this is an affiliate link)

It is rated 4.5 stars by more than 100 users. For $19, I think this will save me a whole bunch of frustration. There is a less expensive version with clear acrylic panels and open sides, but since this will get tossed in the radio bag, I was more comfortable with an enclosed case.

Marking tested cables was the next problem — I didn't want to test the same cable twice. I thought about heat shrink, but that seemed like overkill. Colored electrical tape would work, but cables hit the floor and tape ends lift, collecting lint and dirt. The solution I landed on: red and green gel nail polish. Charge-only cables get red. Data-capable cables get green. I cure the dots with the UV flashlight I carry when I travel.

365nm Black Light Flashlight, UV Flashlight Rechargeable with LCD Display, Powerful Ultraviolet Lights for Pet Urine Detection, Resin Curing, Rockhounding, Scorpion, Uranium Glass, A/CLeak (this is an affiliate link)

That seemed to work. It took about a minute of exposure to cure the nail polish dots to the point they were firm and no longer tacky.

And I have another use planned for the red polish. Mom used to love going trolling for trout. Her favorite lure was a Dick Nite spoon. She always used a spot of red polish to put an eye on her lure. She called it her "Tricky Dicky" lucky lure. Good memory.

Earbud for AllScan UCI80M

I went looking for a way to monitor conversations on AllStar using one of my nodes configured with an AllScan UCI80M USB Communications Interface. The UCI80M uses a Motorola M1 speaker-mic connector. I found an earbud with an M1 connector and gave it a try. These are common in K1 (Kenwood) configurations but harder to find in M1.

It works. The push-to-talk mic tested as "good audio" with the Enhanced Parrot on node 55553. Transmitted audio isn't studio quality, but it's understandable.

More interesting is the earbud itself. It's a single unit with a rubbery tip that fits comfortably in the ear canal. When I first plugged it in, the audio level was painfully high and distorted.

In AllStar, TX and RX audio levels are set in /etc/asterisk/simpleusb.conf. It's somewhat counterintuitive: the audio you hear is set on the TXMIXASET line, and the audio you transmit is set on RXMIXASET. I worked my way down from the default of 500 — tried 400, 300, 100, 50. Still too loud. At 40, still too loud. At 30, clear and comfortable. Below 30, no output at all. So 30 it is.

The package also included an acoustic tube earbud. I normally skip those — never liked how they feel — but tested it anyway. Surprise: barely any audio at 30. Cranked TXMIXASET back to 500 and got excellent, clear audio at a comfortable level. Pro tip: if the standard earbud is too loud, try the acoustic tube before fiddling with the config. Also, if you're getting static, try rotating the plug slightly in the PTT housing.

2 Pin Earpiece M1 Ear Piece Headset Ptt Mic to 3.5mm Aux Audio Earphone for Motorola cp100 cls1410 gp300 cp200d bpr40 CLS 1110 1410 cp185 dlr1060 rdm2070d dlr1020 rmu2040 rdu4100 dtr700 (this is an affiliate link)

This device has only 3.1 stars on Amazon, but from a sample of seven reviews. I thought it was worth the gamble at around $20. I’d give it 3.5 stars myself — maybe 4 if it proves durable. It does exactly what I needed: a way to monitor and participate in AllStar conversations through the UCI80M.

Fair warning: overmodulated stations really punch through when the speaker is millimeters from your eardrum. Great in a noisy environment. In a quiet room, bring TXMIXASET down.

04 Run Your Own NotebookLM — Locally

If you’ve used Google’s NotebookLM, you already know the appeal: drop in a document, ask questions, get answers grounded in your actual source material rather than whatever the model feels like inventing.

Open Notebook is the self-hosted version of that idea. Same workflow — upload PDFs, web pages, or documents, chat with an AI about the content, generate notes and summaries — but running entirely on your own hardware, with your choice of AI provider. It supports Ollama, so if you’re already running local models, you’re most of the way there.

I spun it up in a morning in an LXC container on my Proxmox server, pointed it at my existing Ollama instance, and had it ingesting a budget document within the hour. The install is Docker Compose — two containers, a config file, and you’re done.

The Open Notebook project is at github.com/lfnovo/open-notebook. If you’ve got a home lab and you’ve been curious about NotebookLM but prefer keeping your documents off Google’s servers, this is worth your time.

05 Digital Radio News Digest

Digital radio news is a bit light this week.

Recent developments in amateur radio digital voice and VoIP linking modes include updates to AllStarLink, with improvements to QSO One stability and the introduction of YAAMon, a new AllStarLink monitor. The MMDVMHost repository has also seen an update, and the app_rpt repository has received several commits, including fixes for call failures and additions to non-blocking PTT kick pipes. The Amp-ASL amp-server repository has been working on a custom Pi image to streamline installation.

06 Band Conditions This Week

With a solar flux of 144 and a sunspot number well into the triple digits, the higher HF bands are in fine shape right now — 10 through 20 meters should reward anyone willing to spin the dial, and DX contacts are well within reach. Today’s K-index of 1 points to quiet, stable conditions, but don’t let that lull you into thinking it’s been a smooth week; a max K of 4.3 tells us the geomagnetic field threw a minor tantrum at some point, likely giving the polar paths a rough go and knocking the low bands around for a stretch. If propagation felt frustrating earlier in the week, today’s the day to get back on and make up for lost time.

• Solar Flux Index (SFI): 144.0 — Good — solid conditions on 10m through 20m

• K-Index (current): 1.0 — Quiet — excellent conditions

• K-Index (7-day max): 4.3 — Minor storm — HF disruption likely

• A-Index: 42 — Minor storm (predicted)

• Sunspot Number (NOAA/USAF daily): 211

• Sunspot Number (SIDC daily EISN): 149

• Active Solar Regions: 14

Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov) + SIDC (sidc.be)
Generated: 2026-06-04 21:03 UTC

07 Radio History

Sixty-three years ago this week, radio amateurs put their second satellite into orbit.

OSCAR 2 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on June 2, 1962, riding piggyback as ballast on a Thor-Agena B rocket carrying a classified military reconnaissance satellite. The irony is hard to miss — while the Air Force was running a spy mission, a group of volunteer hams had quietly hitched their homebuilt spacecraft along for the ride.

OSCAR 2 was nearly identical to OSCAR 1, which had launched just five and a half months earlier in December 1961. The team had learned from the first flight. They adjusted the thermal coatings to keep temperatures lower inside the spacecraft, tweaked the temperature-sensing system to get better data as the batteries aged, and dropped the transmitter power from 140 mW to 100 mW to stretch battery life. The satellite operated for 18 days before going silent, re-entering the atmosphere on June 21.

What’s remarkable isn’t the hardware — it was a simple battery-powered beacon in a metal box — it’s what it represented. By June 1962, amateur radio operators had already placed two satellites into orbit, making them among the earliest civilian participants in the Space Age, arriving only four years after Sputnik. That Project OSCAR lineage runs in a direct line to today’s AMSAT satellites, CubeSats, and the ARISS station aboard the ISS.

Not bad for a bunch of volunteers working on weekends.

08 Short Stack

Digital Radio

• The Iconic aprs.fi App Finally Lands on Android! — “If you are an APRS enthusiast, a portable HF operator, or an automation geek, this is arguably the biggest software drop of the year.”

• Empower Your Emergency Communications with ACK Off Grid Server — “The ACK Off Grid Server presents a transformative solution for emergency communications, catering specifically to amateur radio operators and emergency response teams.”

• Discover Graywolf: The Ultimate APRS Station Software — “Graywolf emerges as a revolutionary all-in-one APRS station software, combining multiple functionalities into a single, user-friendly interface.”

• What Is FT8 and How Does It Work? — “FT8 is a digital ham radio mode designed for making reliable contacts using extremely weak radio signals.”

• APRStac: A Modern APRS Suite in a Single Binary — “APRStac is an APRS web client, digipeater, I-Gate, BBS, fileshare host, email gateway, and multi-protocol bridge developed by KN4MKB under the ModernHam project.”

SDR

• How to Listen to Aircraft with an SDR — “This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to start listening to aircraft using an SDR.”

LoRa

• When Amateur Radio Meets Search and Rescue: LoRa APRS in the Search for Missing Hiker Jaslinda — “As search and rescue teams worked tirelessly to locate missing hiker Jaslinda Saludin, technology from the amateur radio community became part of the operation. Members of the Cameron Highlands Amateur Radio Club supported the effort by providing LoRa APRS tracking devices…”

Antennas

• Should You Disconnect Your Antennas During Thunderstorms? — I do. “If a thunderstorm is close enough that I can hear thunder, I disconnect my antennas. That practice is common among experienced ham radio operators and shortwave listeners alike.”

• Ham Radio Tech: Do Nearby Metal & Trees Significantly Affect Antennas? — “Radio waves don’t exist in isolation. Every antenna interacts with its environment. Houses, gutters, vehicles, power lines, aluminum siding, steel towers, wet leaves, and even your neighbor’s rusty trampoline all become part of the antenna’s ‘neighborhood.’”

Gadgets

• HRWB 264 - Gadgets For The Shack With Randy Hall K7AGE — There are plenty of gadgets listed in the show notes, and as always, the Ham Radio Workbench podcast is a great time.

AI

• NotebookLM finally has an open-source rival, and I’m hooked — “Open Notebook is a project by developer Luis Novo, available freely on GitHub. It does what NotebookLM does. You upload sources, chat with them, ask questions, generate summaries, and even make podcasts.”

• Engineer builds AI laser defense system that wiped out every mosquito in his home — My first thought was: what could go wrong? “A computer vision specialist has built a system that uses deep learning and a laser-based targeting setup to hunt down mosquitoes. Steven Cheng, who works in computer vision and robotics, documented the project as he developed what he calls "the ultimate mosquito killer," turning a simple household annoyance into an engineering challenge.”

Security

• Your Android phone is already a security key and most people never turn it on — I just don’t know about this. We are so dependent upon our phones that they are becoming single points of failure in our lives. Making my phone my security key? I just don’t know.

09 Privacy-Focused Document Software

Do you need an alternative to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace? If so, you’ve probably looked at LibreOffice and OnlyOffice, or maybe Nextcloud. These are document creation and editing packages, sometimes self-described as content collaboration systems.

Something new is on the near horizon: Euro-Office. This software is based on OnlyOffice but comes with a consortium of vendors backing it. It is being updated for the European market with an initial release date of June 9.

Euro-Office doesn’t have the email offering that draws people to M365 or GW. However, it appears that Office.EU will combine Euro-Office and email into a Europe-focused suite, compliant with GDPR and avoiding the U.S. Cloud Act (but I’m not a lawyer, so don’t bank on this conclusion). If all that sounds attractive to you — and it kind of does to me! — head over to https://office.eu/.

If privacy-centered software is your cup of tea, you may also want to think about where your website is hosted. Hetzner, based in Germany, is an affordable option with a solid reputation.

10 If I Win the Lottery: Coffee, Curiosity, and Radio

I’ve often thought: if I win the lottery, I’ll build a clubhouse for my local amateur radio club. It would be great to have a space with different operating stations, maybe some workspaces for making and repairing gear, and since we’re hams: coffee — lots of coffee.

This is purely a thought experiment. As I’ve pondered this, I’ve started to wonder if this might be a way to attract new people into the hobby: a coffee shop with amateur radio operating stations. Certainly the local hams would visit, so we’d often have licensed, experienced people available. But would younger people visit? Maybe — if it was positioned as a coffeehouse where makers and radio operators were doing things with hardware and software and radio waves.

Is that enough of a draw? I don’t know. I do know it’s different than what I hear in conversations about attracting people to the hobby. Clearly, what brought licensed hams into the community over the years has varied. Service in the military is one group of people. Silicon Valley folks another. I’m a Sputnik/Apollo kid, so NASA and hearing radio coming to Earth live from space was a big deal for me. Later, we’ve seen preppers getting licensed.

People in each of these groups saw amateur radio as something they could use to do something with. And for most of them, worldwide communication was not something they carried around in their pocket. That has changed. Getting connected is no longer the draw — the smartphone solved that problem decades ago, and younger generations have never known a world without it.

But maybe, just maybe, connecting locally over a cup of coffee in a tech-oriented space would pull the curtain back on this mysterious thing called amateur radio, at least for some people.

Will I ever do this? I would have to buy lottery tickets, and that’s something I almost never do. But if I did, and if I won, I think creating a radio maker space with coffee would be a grand thing to do. The best part: I’d never run out of coffee.

11 QRT: End Transmission

New Mini PC by HP

HP announces new OmniDesk Mini PC: World’s first “AI Mini PC” with Intel Core Ultra and Thunderbolt Share — I do love me a good PC by HP. No idea how much this is going to cost (undoubtedly too much) but might be worth watching for on eBay in a few years!

The Knack

I overheard some conversation on the W6EK repeater in California about “the knack.” This brought back memories of how I would disassemble many things in my childhood…and only occasionally getting them put back together again in working order. I share this Dilbert YouTube in case you find the humor entertaining. I do.

I’m guessing that “The Knack” is a real thing. The disassembly-to-reassembly success ratio in childhood is probably a reasonable predictor of career trajectory in this great hobby of hobbies: amateur radio.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

Welcome to Random Wire 184.

It’s great to see the sun again — we don’t get all that many warm, clear days during winter in the Pacific Northwest. And while I am really enjoying baking the winter cold out of my bones, I’m concerned that we’re in for another historic wildfire season. We had a warm-ish winter and the snowpack is generally well below average. Predictions are for a hot, dry summer that may set new records. We joke about Californians moving to Washington and Oregon, but it’s not quite as funny that California weather is also creeping northward. I have my fingers and toes crossed, hoping that we don’t have a perfect storm of wildland fire conditions this year. In short: please be careful out there!

01 Thank You…to Field Day Operators

ARRL Field Day 2026 is just around the corner and savvy radio operators are busy organizing their gear and making plans. For some, this is a contest. For others, it’s an annual social event. And for others, it’s a chance to give the general public a glimpse into our very wide and deep hobby. Whatever camp you’re in, I want to express gratitude for participating in one of the biggest annual amateur radio events in the world. Have fun, make lots of contacts, and share your challenges and successes with others. That’s how we learn how to do it better next time and to be prepared!

02 New on EtherHam.com

It was a busy week in all aspects of my life, but I still found some time to dive into a few topics…mainly Raspberry Pi-focused, but interesting, nevertheless:

• AllStar Node with Raspberry Pi 4: New Case and UPS Hat

• Inside EtherHam: May 2026

• Monitoring and Managing a Raspberry Pi 4: Three Tools, Three Jobs

• Your Raspberry Pi 4 Makes a Surprisingly Good Home NAS — With Music Streaming

For next week, I’ll also be working up an article on using a mini PC powered by an N150 CPU as the basis for a network-attached storage (NAS) device. As I tie a ribbon around this issue, I have that NAS box running on my LAN and streaming Steely Dan music to my laptop. It is working much better than the Raspberry Pi 4 NAS, running the same software stack. This is a win and I’m looking forward to sharing my write-up with you. Here’s a teaser photo of the interesting hardware platform I built this on.

Vertically cooled, six NVMe spaces, two 2.5GB Ethernet ports, and powered straight off the mains (no power brick or wall wart). It is much more responsive than the Raspberry Pi 4-based NAS build, and just as important to me, it runs much cooler.

04 TIDRADIO TD-H9: Still Working On It

I spent more time — lots of time! — trying to get APRS to beacon automatically on the TD-H9. I’ve not been able to figure out cause-and-effect with this radio. I change a setting and the behavior doesn’t change. Then I don’t change a setting and the behavior does change. It beacons when I move the radio, then it doesn’t. Or it doesn’t beacon at all, even though it is set to do so. I’ve driven to town with the radio set to beacon and it beacons when I leave, but not again. I’ve driven to another city, and once it beaconed and the other time it didn’t.

Confusing doesn’t begin to cover it.

I find no explanation of the differences between two firmwares: a TD-H9 1.0.32 version dated May 7, 2026, and a TD-H9 APRS 1.0.15 version dated January 9, 2026. Maybe I need to try the APRS firmware version…but first, I’ll update to the latest and greatest firmware and try that.

I did not find a USB-C cable that worked, nor do I have the proper K-1 programming cable. I will before Friday, though, so hopefully I’ll get this done in time for this issue of the Random Wire.

I have a second radio coming so I can make sure this isn’t baked into the radio. It’s orange and you’ll want to see pictures, so I should have more to report and show you next week.

Bottom line: still working on it, stay tuned.

05 Repackaged AllStar Node and Restored Configs

I bought a case with room for a Raspberry Pi hat, and added an uninterruptible power supply hat to the Pi. The AllStar node is built on a Raspberry Pi 4 and uses the AllScan UCI80M USB Communications Interface for high-quality audio. That seems to be working well, although there are two modifications I want to make: add a momentary on/off button to trigger a safe shutdown if the system locks up, and add a cooling fan. Find the article on the EtherHam site: AllStar Node with Raspberry Pi 4: New Case and UPS Hat

Once I got the Pi moved into the new case, did some scripting, and tested, I noticed that the system was unstable. Suspecting a microSD card that was beginning to fail, I chose to install a fresh AllStarLink 3 Appliance package to a new microSD card.

Normally, I would then walk through the configuration menus and manually enter all the necessary settings. This time, I didn’t do that. This time, while running on the failing microSD card, I copied a host of configuration files to a network drive. Then I shut down, installed the ASL3 Appliance package to a new microSD, booted from the new card, and copied those configuration files to the new card.

There were a couple of permission issues that interrupted things. The Allmon3 package had no password set, so I took care of that manually. And the Cockpit interface kept failing, but that was because it was reading old cookies from my browser. Once I flushed those cookies, the system stabilized and all was well.

I don’t think I saved any time doing it this way, but I did prevent most of the inevitable fumble-fingered mistakes that always come with manually configuring settings. I wanted to test how easy it was to mount a network drive, move files from the node, then move files back to the node. That worked nicely.

The performance of this particular platform proved to be poorer than I expected, so I changed some settings to push the chip a little harder. That increased the operating temperature, with the CPU reaching 70°C — still below the point where throttling begins at 80°C, but warmer than I’m comfortable with. To resolve this, I’ve ordered a fan to add to the system and should be able to report on this next week.

06 The Short Stack

EmComm

• Ham Radio EmComm Insights: A Look at the Narrow Band Emergency Messaging System — “…the Narrow Band Emergency Messaging System…is an open-source software package that allows licensed amateurs to send data via RF.”

• The Best Two-Way Radios for Bug-Out Bags and Off-Grid Emergency Communications — “…not all radios are equal, and there’s an enormous amount of bad information online right now. If you’re building a bug-out bag or emergency communications kit, here’s what actually matters — and what doesn’t.”

Shortwave

• The internet’s creepiest radio mystery is live on shortwave, and you can hear it for yourself — “I found some genuinely strange signals. Some of them were ordinary military, utility, or timing signals, but some of what I found have a genuinely creepy and interesting history behind them.”

Raspberry Pi

• Why Are Raspberry Pis So Expensive? (+Tips to Get One Cheap) — “I dug into the reasons why, and there are a few tricks that can really help.”

• RAKwireless WisMesh Pi HAT RAK6421 turns your Raspberry Pi 4/5 into a modular Meshtastic gateway — “RAKwireless WisMesh Pi HAT RAK6421 is a modular Meshtastic gateway expansion board for Raspberry Pi 4/5 that adds support for the company’s WisBlock ecosystem. Designed for users running meshtasticd (the Linux-native Meshtastic service), it enables scalable, always-on Meshtastic base stations, MQTT gateways, and backbone relay nodes.”

Logging

• Best Amateur Radio Logging Apps for Android and iOS in 2026 — “Here are the best amateur radio logging apps for Android and iOS right now, based on features, LoTW/QRZ support, contest use, and offline capability.”

07 Digital Radio News Digest

Perhaps the most interesting item to me is the update on the LinHT project. I’m looking forward to eventually getting one of these open source transceivers in my hands and on the air.

Summary

Recent developments in amateur radio digital voice and VoIP linking modes include updates to M17 hardware testing, AllStarLink forum discussions on Asterisk core dumps and Debian 12 server issues, and GitHub commits for various VoIP linking systems. The M17 Project has reported on the hardware testing status of LinHT Rev B, while the AllStarLink community has been discussing issues with Asterisk core dumps and server setup. VoIP linking systems have seen updates to app_rpt, ASL3, and amp-server.

Per-Mode Breakdown

DMR

There is limited information available for DMR, with only one GitHub commit mentioning a cleanup involved with renaming in MMDVMHost.

YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X

Random Wire has published an article on upgrading MMDVM hats, but there are no other notable updates for YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X.

M17

The M17 Project has reported on the hardware testing status of LinHT Rev B, and there have been GitHub commits for OpenRTX firmware, including a fix for the miosix GCC toolchain path.

Wojciech Kaczmarski was kind enough to alert me to an update published on the M17 Project page. Find that at: LinHT Rev B – hardware testing status.

VoIP Linking

The AllStarLink community has been discussing various issues on their forum, including Asterisk core dumps, Debian 12 server setup, and Echolink loopback. There have also been several GitHub commits for VoIP linking systems, including updates to app_rpt, ASL3, amp-server, and asl-parrot.

Notable Firmware or Software Updates

• app_rpt version 3.9.3

• app_rpt version 3.9.2

• ASL3 commit to improve Broadcastify Experience

• OpenRTX firmware commit to fix miosix GCC toolchain path

• amp-server commit to overhaul call state management

• asl-parrot commits to overhaul call state management and update to latest amp-core

Last run: 2026-05-28 22:07 UTC -- 23 items collected.
Download the collected items here.

08 Band Conditions This Week

Conditions: a decent setup heading into the weekend, but not without caveats. An SFI of 108 and a quiet K-index of 2 put us in good shape for reliable HF propagation, with 20, 17, and 15 meters likely performing well for both regional ragchews and longer DX paths.

That said, the past week wasn’t entirely smooth sailing; a 7-day max Kp of 3.7 hints that we saw some unsettled stretches that may have rattled the higher bands, and with the predicted A-index sitting at 11, it’s worth keeping an eye on conditions rather than assuming the calm will hold. With 15 active solar regions and a healthy sunspot count, the sun is staying busy, so there’s plenty of potential energy in the pipeline — for better or worse.

• Solar Flux Index (SFI): 108.0 — Moderate — reliable HF propagation

• K-Index (current): 2.0 — Quiet — good conditions

• K-Index (7-day max): 3.7 — Active — some HF degradation

• A-Index: 11 — Unsettled (predicted)

• Sunspot Number (NOAA/USAF daily): 103

• Sunspot Number (SIDC daily EISN): 155

• Active Solar Regions: 15

Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov) + SIDC (sidc.be)
Generated: 2026-05-28 22:05 UTC

09 Radio History

A few milestones cluster around this time of year that are worth a moment of reflection — especially if you’re the kind of operator who thinks about where we came from…and maybe wonder where we’re going!

May 1919: QST comes back to life

When QST returned in May 1919, it came back as an eight-page bulletin with no cover, barely resembling the magazine it had been before the wartime shutdown. Amateur radio had been banned since April 1917, and hams still weren’t back on the air — that wouldn’t happen until that October, when a supplement to the fall issue famously proclaimed “BAN OFF.” But the magazine’s return was the signal that the community intended to survive the hiatus.

June 1933: The first Field Day

The first ARRL Field Day was held June 10–11, 1933, under the name International Field Day. Ed Handy, W1BDI, then ARRL Communications Manager, is credited with the idea. About 50 portable stations participated, and the point was straightforward: could amateurs pack up their gear, get out of their shacks, and keep communicating under field conditions? Ninety-three years later, that question still drives the last full weekend of June every year. POTA, portable ops, and EmComm culture are all downstream of that original experiment.

May 1952: The 15-meter band opens — but just for CW

On May 1, 1952, the FCC opened the 15-meter band to U.S. amateurs — CW only. Phone privileges on 15 meters didn’t arrive until March 1953, and the same 1952 rulemaking also extended phone operation to 40 meters, which had previously been CW-only. Taken together, these changes reshaped HF operating and helped accelerate the slow migration from AM toward SSB that would play out across the rest of the decade. It’s one of those regulatory moments that didn’t look like a turning point at the time, but really was.

A personal aside: I missed the real Kon-Tiki anniversary

I wanted to work the topic of the Kon-Tiki into this column, but I missed the anchor: the raft departed Peru on April 28, 1947. That’s a late April anniversary, not late May, and I didn’t catch it until after the fact.

Still worth saying: the Kon-Tiki expedition carried an amateur radio station — callsign LI2B — operated by Knut Haugland and Torstein Raaby, both former Norwegian resistance radio operators from World War II. Over a 101-day voyage across the Pacific, they maintained regular contact with American, Canadian, and South American ham stations, relaying position and meteorological data to the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. The December 1947 issue of QST called it “the most unusual expedition ever to place reliance on amateur radio for communication.”

I read Heyerdahl’s book over and over as a kid, long before I knew anything about ham radio. His writing instilled in me a taste for adventure, and a realization that sometimes, one had to think outside the box to achieve something wondrous.

It turns out the radio operators on that raft were doing something I’d later spend a lot of time thinking about: proving that if you have the right gear, the right skills, and a schedule to keep, you can communicate from anywhere.

That’s not a bad way to describe Field Day, either.

10 QRT: End Transmission

Busy Week

I was surprised by how busy I was this past week. The biggest event was a medical incident requiring taking my wife by ambulance to the emergency room. We got home 11 hours later. The good news: we got home. The bad news: we’re going to have to make that trip to the hospital again to fully resolve the situation.

Domain renewals

If you followed Random Wire issues 182 and 183, you know I’ve been talking a bit about the rising cost of domain renewals. Hours after issue 183 was published, I receive a notice that my EtherHam domains were up for renewal. I’m glad they remind me and I immediately paid to renew them…and yes, costs are rising.

Embarrassing Shack Moment

There I was, concentrating on my laptop screen, when I heard audio on my AllStar node beside me. That’s odd, I thought — that node isn’t supposed to be connected to anyone right now. I turned up the volume but it didn’t respond. I looked at Allmon3 and AllScan to try to figure this out but wasn’t getting anywhere. Then I asked Claude what might be causing connected nodes not to show up, and boy, that was a rabbit hole.

Several minutes later, I reached for the node and that’s when I noticed what I had done: I had put my M1KE device right behind the speaker-mic stand. I wasn’t hearing my node. I was hearing our local YSF/WiRES-X repeater through the M1KE. This is where that SMH abbreviation — shaking my head — really hits home.

The good news? The M1KE audio sounded almost as good as my AllStar node!

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

The other was something about requiring manufacturers to include the ST-Link v2 dongle to “democratize” electronics. Nope, I didn’t say that, either.

Nevertheless, there is some value to be had from this interpretive verbalization of my written content. If nothing else, it can be humorous to listen to the AI voices pronounce technical words incorrectly and then make leaps of logic that are invisible to the rest of us. I hope you enjoy this.

Hamvention

How was Hamvention? I wasn’t able to go, but during the event, I got emails from ham friends who were there. It sounds like it was a grand time.

As I expected, Yaesu did announce the new DR-3X repeater series. I’m sure we’ll be learning how some of the new/advanced features play out and what that means for your existing Yaesu radios.

1 ~ Thank You to…My Local Club Members

When I was a brand new ham with a shiny Technician ticket, I had a handheld transceiver. With that, I participated in nets on the local 2 meter repeater and worked satellites with a handheld Yagi antenna. I got a lot of mileage out of very little gear and I learned a lot.

Today, I want to say thank you to my club members — the ones who helped me get started, who encouraged me along the way, and who continue to help others join and enjoy this great hobby.

There really are too many to list, but some stand out for me. (If I left you off the list, I blame age and memory!) Some of the folks who have been impactful in my amateur radio journey include:

• Gary AC7VA — That free MFJ antenna tuner made it possible for me to get on HF once I built my antenna and got an HF rig!

• Lee W7FBI (SK) — I have an old Kenwood TS-520S I bought from W7FBI (SK) in good but “well loved” condition. It still has Lee’s #2 pencil marks on the Drive dial. I enjoyed this radio very much during the earliest part of my amateur radio journey, getting on HF with a homemade off-center-fed antenna.

• Dave N7HT — I never — never! — would have been able to get my Extra Class ticket without his tutelage. His patience with me was astounding. I didn’t understand most of the terms so he built my knowledge from the ground up.

• Brian NT7Y — Brian held the club together during the challenging Covid years and I usually chat with him in person every week.

• Jeff W7NEE — Leading the charge into digital radio for our local ham radio community, including standing up a YSF/WiRES-X repeater.

• Ben AB7I — Club president for several years, expanding meeting content and pulling in new members. A local POTA master.

• Anne AI7PS — She has picked up the POTA torch and is running with it!

There really are many other folks who have been great to me. I feel lucky to be part of such a great group of amateur operators who also like to help others.

2 ~ No M17 Net on Saturday

It is Memorial Day weekend. Last Saturday, Jeff AE5ME announced there would be no M17 net on Saturday, May 23, because of the Memorial Day weekend. This net is normally held every Saturday at noon Central time and is carried over America’s Kansas City Wide Network.

3 ~ New on EtherHam

It was another big week for deeper content on EtherHam.com with five new articles: three articles relating to Raspberry Pi computers, one about selecting a computer for your home AI platform, and a very deep dive into updating a stubborn MMDVM hat.

• Headless Raspberry Pi 4 in the Home Lab: A Practical Setup Guide — “Setting up a headless Raspberry Pi 4 as a utility machine in the home lab sounds straightforward — until you’re forty-five minutes in and wondering why you can’t connect to your own machine. This guide covers OS selection, SSH, IP reservation, RustDesk remote desktop, firewall setup, and a few hard-won lessons about dummy plugs and drifting IP addresses.”

• How to Back Up and Restore a Raspberry Pi microSD Card with Win32 Disk Imager — “MicroSD cards fail. If you run Raspberry Pi-based AllStarLink nodes long enough, it’s not a matter of if — it’s when. Win32 Disk Imager is a solid free tool for creating and restoring card images, but the interface offers almost no guidance and there’s a gotcha when restoring to a replacement card that trips up a lot of people. This guide covers the complete workflow, including a tool called PiShrink that most Pi users probably don’t know about.”

• You Want a Home AI Machine. You Can’t Find a Mac Mini. Now What? — “The standard advice for running AI locally has been consistent for over a year: get a Mac Mini M4. Apple Silicon’s unified memory architecture is well-suited to the task, Ollama works out of the box, and the thing runs nearly silently. The problem is that right now, in mid-2026, Mac Mini M4 models are scarce and expensive — $1,000 or more if you can find one at all. The eBay refurb play that used to work on Apple hardware? Gone. So let’s talk about what you can actually buy today.”

• Undervoltage Shutdown Monitor for Raspberry Pi AllStar Nodes — “Most inexpensive USB power banks aren’t true pass-through devices — connect or disconnect a charger while the Pi is running and you’ll get a hiccup just long enough to cause an unclean shutdown and risk microSD corruption. Here’s a lightweight bash script and systemd service that uses the Pi’s built-in vcgencmd to detect undervoltage and shut down cleanly before the bank dies completely.”

• Unlocking the “Locked” MMDVM Dual Hat: A Firmware Recovery Guide — “If your MMDVM Dual Hat hotspot is throwing a “locked by vendor” firmware update error, don’t order a new board yet. There’s another way in — and it involves a $10 tool that embedded developers use every day but most ham operators have never heard of. This guide walks you through the complete procedure for recovering and updating your board’s firmware using an ST-Link V2 programmer, written by a ham operator who learned it the hard way so you don’t have to.”

4 ~ Gear

Another AllStar Node

Since I had put together the Raspberry Pi 4 for an EtherHam post, I decided to purchase another AllScan UCI80M and Motorola microphone to make a new AllStar node. It took just a few minutes because I already had the Raspberry Pi 4 built and configured.

There are three layers in this stack: hardware, software, and configuration settings. The resources I used for this build are documented in these four EtherHam posts:

• Hardware: Assembling the Raspberry Pi 4 and Case

• AllScan UCI – ASL3 Installation Guide

• TechNote: Shutdown an ASL3 Node with Three Key-Ups

• SayIP for ASL3

I now have an AllStar node that announces the IP address when it boots up and I can shut it down with three clicks of the speaker-mic. I also installed one of my favorite AllStar apps:

• AllScan: AllStar Favorites Management & Scanning Web App

I set up this node to use my home wifi or my cell phone when the phone is in hotspot mode. When I travel, I’ll hear the IP address of the connection with my phone, allowing me to open AllScan on my phone.

AllStar Node: Case With UPS

I continue my experiments with using a battery system to power an AllStar node. In fact, I wrote up my work about a shutdown script that is supposed to safely shut down my node when the battery voltage starts to sag. Unfortunately, my premise was faulty. I expected USB power banks would show declining voltage as they neared exhaustion. That’s not what happened. The onboard battery management system on these USB banks has maintained voltage until it couldn’t any longer, then it abruptly shut down the power bank.

Aligned with my interest in using a battery with an AllStar node, I ordered a Pi-Shop Raspberry Pi 4 case with room for an uninterruptible power supply hat. This will be for an AllStar node that will be used at home and mobile. The reason for the UPS is to allow me to disconnect the node — while it is running — and move it to the vehicle without shutting it down.

This package is scheduled to arrive next week. I’m looking forward to putting it together. I continue to experiment with USB power banks as a power source for an AllStar node, but building a system with a built-in battery just makes sense.

Running rtl_tcp.exe as Service on Windows 11 Pro

If you’re using an RTL-SDR dongle as a network source for SDR++ or other software, you may want rtl_tcp to start automatically when your PC boots — without having to remember to launch it manually. The obvious solution is to register it as a Windows service. The problem is that rtl_tcp.exe is a console application, not a proper Windows service, and the Service Control Manager expects a program to “check in” after launching. When it doesn’t, you get Error 1053 and the service dies.

The fix is a wrapper called WinSW (Windows Service Wrapper), available at https://github.com/winsw/winsw/releases. Drop WinSW-x64.exe (renamed to winsw.exe) in the same folder as rtl_tcp.exe, then create a simple XML config file (named winsw.xml) alongside it:

<service>
  <id>RTL_TCP</id>
  <name>RTL_TCP</name>
  <description>RTL-SDR TCP Server</description>
  <executable>C:\SDRPP\rtl-sdr\rtl_tcp.exe</executable>
  <arguments>-a 192.168.68.65</arguments>
</service>

From an admin PowerShell in that folder, run .\winsw.exe install followed by .\winsw.exe start. Your RTL-SDR TCP server will now survive reboots on its own.

5 ~ If You Want to Work the ISS on APRS

It appears the only working APRS radio on the ISS at the moment is the Kenwood D710GA in the Zvezda Service Module, call sign RS0ISS. More information is available on the ISS Ham Radio Status page. and you can check recent activity on APRS.fi.

As of now, the active ISS APRS station is:

• Callsign: RS0ISS

• Frequency: 437.825 MHz FM

• Mode: 1200 baud APRS packet on 70cm/UHF

If you plan to work the ISS on APRS, remember that Doppler correction matters much more on 437.825 MHz than it did on 145.825. This means pre-programming multiple memories (±10 kHz steps) is now much more important for successful packet decoding.

6 ~ Short Stack from the Interwebs

Radios & SDR

• I turned my browser into a worldwide radio scanner, and I wasn’t ready for what I heard — “Then I discovered KiwiSDR, which made radio scanning and OSINT way more approachable. It takes a High-Frequency (HF) receiver a step further and adds a built-in Ethernet port and web server, making it visible and controllable online. Now, instead of needing expensive transceivers, I can open a browser and control radio receivers that other people have already set up, connected to real antennas, across the globe.”

• Comparing the Icom R75, JRC NRD-545, Yaesu FTDX 1200, and Perseus SDR on Shortwave — “For shortwave listeners and radio hobbyists trying to decide between a tabletop communications receiver, a ham transceiver, or an SDR setup, this comparison offers practical insight into how these radios perform in actual listening conditions rather than on paper specifications alone.”

Digital Radio

• Rhizomatica releases Mercury, a fully open-source modem for data communications on HF — “Rhizomatica is pleased to officially launch Mercury, a completely open-source Digital Radio OFDM protocol for HF broadcast and peer-to-peer ARQ connections with compatible TCP interfaces, built for reliable store-and-forward email and file transfer over HF radio links.”

• Beta/test version: PinPoint APRS v2.2 Build 260517 (May 17, 2026) — I’m running this beta version and it seems fine. Find the details here.

• APRS status on the ISS — “Please note we're still in the process of troubleshooting and testing this radio. APRS is currently active on 437.825 MHz. Feel free to check out status reports here.”

• AREDN Mesh – Beginners Guide For Joining A Network — “Presentation on AREDN mesh for beginners.”

Antennas

• Guide to Prepping for ARRL Field Day 2026: Part 3, Antennas — “In Part 3 of our series on prepping for ARRL Field Day 2026 (June-27-28), we’ll be looking at some of the Field Day antenna options available at DX Engineering…”

Computing & Artificial Intelligence

• GMKtec Mini Gaming PC, 1TB SSD 32GB RAM, AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS(Up to 5.1GHz), Mini Desktop Computer, Oculink, Dual RJ45 2.5G, NucBox K8 Plus — If you are thinking of a standalone AI platform on your network, this PC may fill the bill. A Mac Mini M4 is ideal, but they are scarce as hen’s teeth now…and if you do find one, they are priced accordingly. This GMKtec has a desirable AMD CPU, fast DDR5 memory, and the option to add an external GPU via the Oculink port. This is the best price I’ve found for this platform. (Not an affiliate link.)

• Local LLMs have one advantage ChatGPT and Claude can’t match, and it’s why I’m switching — “With a local LLM, when you're working strictly on your computer, your material and your work don't have to leave your computer, go to a server, and then come back. No third party collects or stores your information — it stays entirely on your device…This is where a local LLM shines: it’s one you truly control. Yes, if you don't have a supercomputer, it's not going to be the same experience as a cloud AI.”

• Top Raspberry Pi Gear for Ham Radio Enthusiasts — “The Raspberry Pi is a small, affordable computer that opens up a world of possibilities for amateur radio enthusiasts.”

• 5 things my Raspberry Pi travel router can do that other travel routers can’t — “The travel router I built out of a Raspberry Pi can do everything a regular travel router can, but it can do almost anything else you can imagine.”

7 ~📋Digital Radio News Digest

Summary

Recent developments in amateur radio digital voice and VoIP linking modes include updates to AllStarLink, with new API and automation features, as well as discussions on M17 packet mode data and activity at Hamvention. Additionally, there have been updates to the MMDVM Host and app_rpt software. The OpenRTX firmware has also been updated with a new ADC driver for the AT32F423.

Per-Mode Breakdown

DMR

The MMDVM Host software has been updated to modify the JSON to be more consistent. A new Brandmeister DMR app for Windows/Linux called VoxDMR has been announced on Reddit.

D-STAR

There is no significant recent development for D-STAR in the collected items.

YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X

There is no significant recent development for YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X in the collected items.

M17

The OpenRTX firmware has been updated with a new ADC driver for the AT32F423. The M17 Users Groups.io has discussed various topics, including M17 packet mode data, activity at Hamvention, and the use of the MMDVM_HS_Dual hotspot in M17. The m17-gateway has added SX1255 HAT support and an experimental messaging bridge.

VoIP Linking

AllStarLink has introduced a new API and automation features, including a REST API and guarded AI tool access for ASL3 nodes. The app_rpt software has been updated to version 3.9.1, with additional commits to fix issues with locks and Echolink audio processing. The Amp-ASL amp-server has also been updated with several commits to fix defects and improve functionality.

Cross-Mode Developments There are no significant cross-mode developments in the collected items.

Generated: Last run: 2026-05-21 17:16 UTC -- 50 items collected
Download the collection (with URLS): https://etherham.com/download/179602489/?tmstv=1779385736

8 ~📡Band Conditions This Week

Conditions have settled nicely heading into the weekend, with a current K-index of 1 and a predicted A-index of 7 pointing to quiet, stable propagation — good news for anyone planning some air time. With an SFI of 93, the higher HF bands aren’t exactly on fire, but 40 and 20 meters should be reliable workhorses for both regional contacts and modest DX, and 80 meters will reward the night owls. Worth noting, though: the week wasn’t all smooth sailing — that 7-day max K-index of 6.3 means we had at least one genuine geomagnetic storm roll through, so if your logbook looks a little thin from mid-week, that’s likely why.

By the way, May often coincides with strong sporadic-E propagation in the Northern Hemisphere.

• Solar Flux Index (SFI): 93.0 — Fair — lower bands performing better

• K-Index (current): 1.0 — Quiet — excellent conditions

• K-Index (7-day max): 6.3 — Storm conditions — significant HF disruption

• A-Index: 7 — Quiet (predicted)

• Sunspot Number (NOAA/USAF daily): 20

• Sunspot Number (SIDC daily EISN): 87

• Active Solar Regions: 8

Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov) + SIDC (sidc.be).
Generated: 2026-05-21 17:02 UTC

9 ~ 📻This Week in Radio History

May 18, 1980 — Mount St. Helens Eruption and Emergency Communications

The eruption of Mount St. Helens knocked out telephone infrastructure across a wide area of southwestern Washington, and amateur radio operators stepped in — supporting search and rescue coordination, damage assessment reporting, and liaison with government agencies. What's less widely remembered is that hams had been providing informal communications support during the weeks of precursor activity beforehand, as earthquakes and steam venting drew researchers and observers to the area starting in late March. The mountain gave plenty of warning; people were already watching it closely when it finally let go.

I am sharing this because it was impactful to me but not in the way you might think. The month before Mount St. Helens erupted, I had moved to Nevada to take a job as a mining geologist. As a geologist, I had watched for an eruption for years. I was tremendously disappointed to have missed this one.

10 ~ QRT: End Transmission

Another thank you

Hiding in my emails late last week was one from Michael, noting his donation to support the Random Wire and EtherHam, and telling me a bit about himself. If you’ve donated support for the Random Wire and EtherHam and I didn’t get in touch, please reach out to me. Michael, I’m glad I saw your message! I do want to say thank you because I appreciate the support very much. It helps.

Still working on the TIDRADIO TD-H9 radio

I’m still trying to figure out automatic beaconing on the TD-H9 radio. It’s mysterious. It beacons sometimes, but not predictably. I thought maybe it has Smart Beaconing built in, which would mean it would slow down beaconing while stationary and increase the frequency of beacons while moving. Nope, that didn’t happen. The beacon timing setting is also a bit of a black box as it doesn’t seem to make a difference what I enter there. I think my next angle is to install firmware updates and start over. The radio does beacon, but I can’t tell why it sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t.

Websites crashed

Several of my WordPress websites crashed this week. It turns out that one plugin was responsible for all of those white screens with the “critical error” message displayed. I found a couple of other helpful plugins: one that will automatically identify and disable a plugin that causes fatal errors and another that allows you to easily rollback a plugin to an earlier release. And then a fourth website crashed, but this time I was prepared. Five minutes later, it was running smoothly again. That felt like success.

Installed Open Media Vault

I did have fun — and learned a ton — by installing Open Media Vault on a Raspberry Pi 4 with an NVMe drive. I’m using an external USB drive for the file shares. This is preparation for installing and configuring OMV on my Proxmox server. First, I need to acquire a larger external drive so my daughter and I will have plenty of storage space!

A Bittersweet Memorial Day Weekend

Every year around Memorial Day, a few of my siblings and I make the trek to the other side of Washington State to take care of family graves. It’s an event that brings us closer together. Last year, I missed it because my spouse had a major medical event. This year I will miss it again because the medical condition has not resolved. My younger sister’s husband is also having some issues, so this year, she’ll miss it. I know all of our relatives in various cemeteries would understand. Me? I get a deep sense of peace visiting my grandparents, my mom and dad, my aunts and uncles and cousins. The great-grandparents. I will see them all again, and just wish conditions were right to visit them this year.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

00 QRV: Are You Ready?

Welcome to Random Wire issue 182. You are part of a wide-ranging, far-flung community of radio amateurs of all skill levels and interests. We are each unique, and at some level, that also makes us the same. You are welcome here.

It’s Hamvention

It’s time once again for the biggest amateur radio event in the world: Hamvention. I wish I could be there. To all of my ham radio friends attending, have a great time, be safe, and bring back stories to share!

01 Thank You…for Opening the Door

Last week, I thanked Cale K4HCK for his contributions to our community. This week, I’m looking further back—to the very first time the door to amateur radio was cracked open for me.

That door was opened by my uncle James W7FBS (SK).

Growing up in Hoquiam, Washington, Jim belonged to the “Homebrew Generation.” This was an era where you didn’t just buy a radio — you scavenged parts from old broadcast sets and built your own Glowbug transmitters. Jim was a CW operator who, as a teenager, claimed the attic room so he could run a thin wire out the window to a nearby tree.

Years later, long after Jim was gone, my curiosity about amateur radio finally took hold. I realized that Jim’s wire to the tree wasn’t just a piece of copper — for a kid in a small community, it was his connection to the world. I became a ham in part because of the magic Jim experienced by reaching out across the planet, all with a wire from the attic.

Thank you, Uncle Jim, for helping me glimpse something that has become an enjoyable, fulfilling activity: amateur radio.

02 Yaesu DR-3X: A Third-Generation Fusion Repeater, Right on Cue for Hamvention

Something interesting surfaced in the last couple of days, and the timing is too good to ignore: Yaesu appears to be preparing to announce a new repeater called the DR-3X, billed as the opening act for a third generation of System Fusion. The catch is that as I write this on Wednesday, almost nothing official has landed — and by the time you’re reading this on Friday morning, Hamvention will be underway and the picture may look very different.

So consider this a pre-Hamvention snapshot. I’ll do a proper write-up once the dust settles and Yaesu’s product page goes live.

What seems to be on the table. The earliest credible mention I can find is a Yaesu USA broadcast titled “Special Episode - Yaesu System Fusion 3 & DR-3X series,” posted to YouTube about a day before I started writing this. A Spanish-language post at xreflector.es went up the same day with what reads like a translation of the same announcement. Between the two, here’s what’s being claimed:

• 85 watts on VHF, 65 watts on UHF — a meaningful step up from the DR-2X’s 50W

• 100% continuous duty cycle — the DR-2X is rated 100% only at lower power; full-power continuous would be a real improvement for busy repeaters

• DSP-enhanced analog audio — Yaesu pitching better-sounding FM, not just better digital

• Backward compatibility with existing System Fusion radios

• A new feature called IES (Interference Evasion System) that supposedly detects interference on the input frequency, instructs compatible radios to shift to an alternate access frequency, and reverts when the interference clears. Not frequency-hopping, more like a coordinated fallback. Requires both radio firmware updates and compatible radios — so whatever this is, it’s a feature for the future, not for the existing Fusion fleet.

The honest caveats. As of Wednesday morning, Yaesu’s own website doesn’t have a DR-3X product page. There’s no brochure, no spec sheet, no firmware notes. Independent coverage — the usual ham press, retailers, eHam, the podcasts — hasn’t caught up yet. The two sources I have appear to trace back to the same Yaesu USA announcement, so it’s really one source wearing two hats.

It’s also worth noting that Yaesu was running a DR-2X purchase incentive program as recently as December 2025, which suggests this rollout is fresh enough that the previous generation hadn’t been wound down yet. That’s not a contradiction — but it does mean clubs that just bought a DR-2X shouldn’t feel like they bet on the wrong horse.

Why this is worth watching. If the headline specs hold up, the DR-3X reads like Yaesu addressing two long-standing wishlist items at once: more honest continuous power, and a smarter response to interference than “turn it off and call the trustee.” The IES concept in particular is the kind of thing that only works if the radio side keeps pace — which means it’s also a signal about where the next generation of Fusion handhelds and mobiles is heading.

Hamvention reality check. Yaesu has already announced a four-hour System Fusion education class at Hamvention 2026, and the xreflector post explicitly says the full reveal happens at the show. So if you’re reading this Friday morning and the Yaesu booth has a DR-3X under glass, that’s the real announcement — not anything I’ve written here. I’ll have a proper feature comparison in a future issue once I’ve seen the brochure and, ideally, gotten ears on one.

If you’re at Dayton this weekend, stop by the Yaesu booth and tell me what you see. I’ll happily credit the first reader who sends a confirmed photo of the spec sheet.

03 What’s New on EtherHam?

It has been a very productive week with several new EtherHam.com posts:

• Sizing Up the Enjoybot 12V 30Ah for POTA — I like the all-in-one nature of this battery with accessory ports, no case needed. (But here is a brief cautionary tale. I recall an incident with a battery when fishing with my daughter when she was about 10 years old. She pulled in her trolling gear which was on a stainless steel cable and the cable dropped right on top of the trolling motor battery terminals. Current flowed and the cable vaporized instantly. Be careful around unprotected battery terminals!)

• Hardware: Assembling the Raspberry Pi 4 and Case — If you’ve never put a Pi into a case before, it might seem a little daunting. It’s not hard. I show you how.

• One Sun, Two Rulers: Why Sunspot Numbers Don’t Match — I got frustrated that the sunspot numbers reported by two different tools were wildly different and wondered: why? There are two ways of calculating the number, and it’s helpful to understand which system your tool is using.

• Reclaiming Disk Space on a Dell Wyse 3040 Running AllStarLink 3 — My 3040 was getting a bit low on space so I took a deeper look at what was consuming capacity. And then I fixed it.

• Why Your Domain Renewals Keep Getting More Expensive (And Where This Is Headed) — My domain renewals (yes, I probably have too many domains!) are getting more expensive. Why? Here’s the answer along with my thoughts on where domain renewal prices are headed.

04 TIDRADIO TD-H9: Part 2

A bit more about the TIDRADIO TD-H9 — a 10-watt handheld with great features at a budget price. I’ve found two YouTube videos that proved helpful in understanding the radio, one by KM6LYW and the other by W6IWN (thank you, Ren, for this source).

W6IWN measured +9 watts output on 70 centimeters and on 2 meters, and he touches on many of the great features of the TD-H9:

I did get automatic beaconing working on my radio…well, maybe. I got a couple of packets to launch but so far, it has not been consistent. First, I turned OFF the PTT/Manual triggering of the beacon. I thought I could have that on with the radio also set to timed beaconing, but that does not appear to be the case. Once I turned PTT beaconing off and set timed beaconing to 180 (seconds, I assume), the radio did beacon on its own: once.

The other thing I did was switch to the “18.8inch Foldable Tactical Antenna” that came in the package. Once I did that, signals in and out of the radio improved. The path set in the radio is WIDE1-1, WIDE2-2. That is probably most appropriate in rural areas (like mine) but would be much too busy in an urban area. The more appropriate setting is probably WIDE1-1, WIDE2-1.

My APRS test is not definitive; I’m still working on it, which means I haven’t figured it out yet. Will it beacon? Yes, I’ve proven to myself that it will. Will it do it automatically? Not reliably for me, yet. I’d love to hear your report.

This radio has a built-in spectrum scope. That’s handy. (Press and hold the number 7 touchpad to activate the scope.)

Another feature I wasn’t aware of is the ability to find and load local repeaters. This is done with the radio connected to the Odmaster app on your phone via Bluetooth. The W6IWN video above explains how to do this. My first thought was: what a great radio to include in a go kit! You can look up local repeaters and move them to channels on the radio with the app.

TIDRADIO TD-H9 10Watt GPS&APRS Multi-Band Ham Radio Capable of Bluetooth Connectivity; Wireless Programming; Spectrum Analysis;SMS Message Text; NOAA Weather Receiver Handheld Two Way Radio (Green) (affiliate link)

Available on Amazon in green (I call it Ryobi green), clear, and black. However, it also comes in orange direct from TIDRADIO. I have to admit I like that orange color!

05 Why Your Antenna Hates the Tree Trunk

It is the ultimate temptation. You have a tall, sturdy tree and a long spool of wire. The easiest way to get that wire into the air seems to be running it directly up the trunk.

But before you do this, remember that to your radio, a tree isn’t just a support. It’s a giant, vertical, semi-conductive sponge. (While this sounds like something out of a 1940s Popular Science magazine, it is a real thing. Major General George Owen Squier of the US Army Signal Corps actually patented the “Tree Antenna” in 1904, calling it “floradventure.”)

1. The Microwave Effect (RF Absorption)

A living tree is full of sap — a complex solution of water and electrolytes. To an RF signal, that sap looks like a lossy conductor. When you run your wire right next to the trunk, the electromagnetic field around the wire doesn’t just radiate into space: it also couples with the tree.

Instead of your signal reaching Japan, a significant portion of your power is vibrating the molecules in the wood. You aren’t just an operator anymore. Instead, you’re trying to cook a 50-year-old evergreen from the outside in.

2. The Moving Target (Detuning)

The proximity of the tree trunk creates parasitic capacitance. This acts as a loading effect that electronically lengthens your antenna.

• The SWR Mystery: You might get your antenna tuned perfectly on a dry Monday. But on a rainy Tuesday, the bark gets soaked and the sap flow increases. Suddenly, your SWR (Standing Wave Ratio) is through the roof.

• The Velocity Factor: The mass of the tree changes the velocity factor of the wire. Because the dielectric environment is inconsistent, your antenna becomes a moving target that is nearly impossible to keep resonant on a single frequency.

3. The Bio-Load

If you run a wire too close to a tree, the tree becomes a part of the antenna system — but a very poor one. This is often called dielectric loading. The tree effectively clobbers your radiation pattern. Instead of a nice, clean signal lobe, your tree absorbs the energy on one side, creating a shadow in your coverage. You might find you can hear stations to the East just fine, but the West (where the trunk is) is a total blackout.

4. Mechanical Sawing (The Friction Factor)

Trees are not static. Even on a calm day, a tall conifer is swaying. If your wire is tight against the trunk or a branch, that movement creates constant friction.

• Insulation Failure: Bark is essentially high-grit sandpaper. Over a few months, the tree will chew through the jacket of your wire, leading to a direct short against the wet wood.

• The Snap: When the wind really picks up, a tree can move several feet. If your wire doesn’t have a system to provide slack (like a pulley and a counterweight), the tree will eventually win the tug-of-war.

The Rule of Thumb for Tree Supports

Trees are wonderful antenna supports, provided you treat them as living towers that are also conductive.

• The 2-Foot Rule: Try to keep your radiating wire at least 18 to 24 inches away from the main trunk and large branches.

• Use the “Drip Line”: If possible, use a throw-line to hang your wire from a high branch so it dangles in free air, well away from the conductive mass of the trunk.

• The Pulley is Your Friend: Always use a pulley and a weight (like a gallon of water) at the ground end. This allows the tree to sway while your wire stays at a constant tension.

Keep your wire in the air, but away from the bark.

06 How to Support This Work

The Random Wire and EtherHam sites take time, energy, and money to keep going. I choose to not burden readers with a recurring subscription. Instead, if you find value in this work, please consider buying me a coffee or using other ways of supporting the Random Wire and EtherHam.

I just received a notice from the hosting company for the EtherHam website: they are raising their renewal prices. Costs are going up (I know this isn’t a surprise — we’ve all felt this in our own wallets) and they are adjusting prices accordingly. It’s going to cost me more to renew.

I’ve been noticing the past couple of years that domain prices have also been creeping up. That surprised me, so I researched it. What I learned is shared in Why Your Domain Renewals Keep Getting More Expensive (And Where This Is Headed).

If you are a company and would like to help sponsor the Random Wire and EtherHam, please contact me.

07 HamClock Upgrade to V4.24

I’m using the OpenHamclock Backend on my HamClock, and yesterday, I noticed version 4.24 was available. Upgrading was painless. A new addition is lightning icons on the global view and an option to see lightning counts in the upper right panel.

08 I Listened to the Saturday M17 Net

Last Saturday, I used BlueDV on Windows with Bluetooth headphones to listen to the weekly M17 net on America’s Kansas City Wide Network, but I also used my HOIP phone. And you know what? The HOIP phone worked very well. Here’s how to do this if you have a SIP phone configured to use your HOIP number:

• To monitor a QSO on the Kansas City Wide (KCWide) network using your Hams Over IP (HoIP) phone, dial extension 15135.

• This extension provides a 100% digital connection directly to the KCWide digital network, allowing you to listen to ongoing conversations and nets from your VoIP desk phone or softphone app.

How to Use the Connection

• To Listen (Monitor): Simply dial 15135 and listen to the audio stream.

• To Transmit (Key Up): If you are a licensed amateur radio operator, dial *99 to transmit.

• To Unkey (Receive): Dial # to stop transmitting and return to listening mode.

If you haven’t yet set up your HoIP service:

1. Register: Create an account and request an extension through the Hams Over IP Ticketing System.

2. Configure: Follow the Hams Over IP Wiki to configure your specific hardware (e.g., Cisco or Yealink IP phones) or softphone app (e.g., Groundwire or MicroSIP) with your provided credentials.

3. Alternative Monitoring: If you cannot use your HoIP phone, you can listen to a live, delayed feed of KCWide on Broadcastify.

And I did try listening to the Kansas City Wide Digital Fusion Room 28054 on Broadcastify, too, which also worked well. It’s great to have options.

09 The Short Stack

Most of these finds are sourced from the feeds published on EtherHam.com.

• FreeDV 2.3.0 released — “FreeDV 2.3.0 has been released, including support for running it directly on a compatible Flex 8000 or Aurora series radio, enhancements to performance (thanks to the removal of Python) as well as improvements to FreeDV Reporter filtering functionality and other bug fixes.” More details available on the project’s GitHub page.

Radio

• Tube Radio Passion Projects — “So, I had fond memories of this Capehart, and I set about restoring it. It was still in good shape — in fact, the tubes all tested strong, so I recapped it and tweaked the alignment and it came right back to life. I have used it to listen to my beloved Cardinals broadcasts.”

• The Net Control Station’s Secret Weapon: How NetControl.app Is Changing the Way Hams Run Nets — “NetControl.app is a free web application built by Brian (N4AFK) specifically for amateur radio net control operators. It’s still in beta, but it’s already packed with features that make running a net cleaner, more engaging, and honestly, a lot more fun.”

Digital Radio (M17, PSK31, APRS, FreeDV)

• APRS.world: The Browser-Based APRS Map That’s Changing How Hams See the World — “APRS.world is a real time map and callsign tracker for the global APRS network. It connects directly to the live APRS-IS internet feed. That means every beacon, message, and weather packet that reaches the global servers appears on your screen in seconds.”

• A Return for FreeDV (Digital Voice) — “I will have to write a series of articles on this, as I have done some experimenting with FreeDV. I hope to chat with the FreeDV folk at Hamvention.”

SDR

• RTL-SDR Blog V4 End Of Line — “The RTL-SDR Blog V4 has been a very popular product that we released back in August 2023…the Blog V4 relied on the Rafael R828D chip, which Rafael Micro no longer produces…Unfortunately, this stockpile has now been exhausted, and as far as we are aware, no other usable stockpiles exist, so no more Blog V4 productions will be possible…Going forward, the Blog V3 will remain in stable production.”

• Feeling adventurous? RTL-SDR / LoRa / GPS / RTC, an All-in-One Expansion HAT for Raspberry Pi — “Software-defined radio, long-range communication, satellite positioning, and real-time clock — all on a single HAT. Designed for Raspberry Pi, covering everything from signal monitoring to full IoT deployments.”

Antennas

• If you haven’t looked at SignalStick products lately, you’re in for a treat. Scroll through the online store at https://signalstuff.com/shop/ for more.

• Elecraft Introduces the New AX4 Portable Antenna & BL3 Balun — “Elecraft has just introduced two new products that will likely attract the attention of many POTA activators and portable operators: the AX4 portable vertical antenna and its companion BL3 balun.”

• Portable Ham Radio Insights—Deploying Your Wire Antennas — “This time let’s focus on how to actually get them into the air when you’re operating portable. There’s no single “right” way to do it, but here are a few methods that have worked well for me.”

Raspberry Pi

• My Raspberry Pi 4 still has a job in my homelab, and it isn’t Home Assistant — “Along with a mini PC, the Pi 4 is an essential part of my home lab, keeping an eye on my network, whether I am home or not.”

10 📋Digital Radio News Digest

Executive Summary

It was a busy week in the digital voice and VoIP linking space. OpenRTX pushed firmware fixes addressing UI text input and Linux audio issues. AllStarLink released ASL3 version 3.18-1 with packaging updates and bug fixes, while the Amp-ASL project saw commits targeting buffer sizing and hang diagnosis. On the DMR side, a new Windows/Linux Brandmeister client called VoxDMR surfaced. And a native iOS AllStarLink client, OpLine, is in beta and recruiting TestFlight testers.

Per-Mode Breakdown

DMR

A new Brandmeister app for Windows and Linux called VoxDMR has been announced on Reddit — worth watching if you’re looking for desktop DMR options. Community discussion this week also touched on Bluetooth PAN connections and bridging between commercial and ham DMR systems.

D-STAR

Nothing notable this week.

YSF / C4FM / WiRES-X

Nothing notable this week.

M17

The M17 Foundation published its 2025 financial report. On the firmware side, OpenRTX landed several fixes: _ui_textInputReset() wasn’t clearing the full input buffer, the M17 meta text input label was incorrect, and Linux builds couldn’t read baseband audio file sources. All three are now resolved.

VoIP Linking

AllStarLink released ASL3 3.18-1 with .deb packaging updates and assorted fixes, including a restored ability to make outgoing calls (app_rpt #1046 — useful if that broke for you recently). The Amp-ASL project saw commits for period/buffer size tuning and hang diagnosis. AllScan picked up CSS optimization, row highlighting, and RPT link count display. OpLine, a native iOS AllStarLink client, is in beta and looking for TestFlight testers. Community discussion covered issues with adding private nodes and accessing the web admin portal.

Generated: 2026-05-14 18:17 UTC -- 45 items collected. Click here to download the collected items with URLs.

11 📡Band Conditions This Week

With an SFI of 136 and the K-index sitting at a calm 1.0 today, conditions look favorable — solid performance on 20m through 10m, with good DX opportunities and lively contacts across the higher bands. The week wasn’t entirely smooth sailing though; a 7-day max K-index of 3.3 tells us there were some unsettled stretches that likely rattled the higher bands for a stretch. The predicted A-index of 22 is worth watching — enjoy the quiet window while it lasts.

Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov) and SIDC (sidc.be). Generated: 2026-05-14 18:24 UTC

12 📻This Week in Radio History

Nothing new this week, but a piece on Samuel Morse is too good to sit on, so here it is:

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse tapped out "What hath God wrought" from the U.S. Capitol to Alfred Vail in Baltimore — 40 miles away, nearly instantaneous, and world-changing. The message itself was suggested by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the Patent Commissioner, who had helped Morse secure the $30,000 federal grant to build the line. One of my favorite footnotes: the original machine printed marks on paper tape, but operators quickly realized they could just listen to the clicks and read the message by ear. The acoustic sounder was born, and with it, the culture of listening that still runs through every CW operator today.

13 QRT: End Transmission

Time to close the channel. It was quite the week, marked by a few notable events.

Website broke

The EtherHam website crashed. I found it odd that the home page didn’t crash, but visiting any post yielded an error page. What happened? An automatic plugin update broke the site.

Two hours of detective work later, I realized I had used a particular plugin on the pages with posts but not on the home page. I took a hard look at how I was using this complex plugin and decided I really didn’t need it, so it’s gone.

And then I wondered: did an automatic plugin update cycle bork any of my other websites? Yes! The misbehaving plugin on that site, though, was by a very responsive company and they had it fixed the same day.

Book manuscript

It’s been a busy week at the keyboard — my neck and eyes are feeling it. I’ve been pounding away at my book manuscript and when I saw I was three chapters from the end, I stopped reaching for my radio and instead spent more time at the keyboard. I managed to get the first draft done for all 17 chapters. They are now being looked at by three trusted reviewers.

There will be plenty more to do, including: get quotes (“Voices from the Field”) to amplify several points, get the ISBN, design a cover, select a printer, and more. While the timeline I created called for completing this work by this time next year, I think I’m on track to be in print by this fall.

I’ve been using AI to help with proofreading and assuring consistent formatting. Once in a while, a response from the AI engine makes me laugh, like this one yesterday:

The regex ate the </w:pPr> closing tag on the H1 paragraph

That one tickled my funny bone.

This manuscript has been pulling a lot of memories to the surface. A few chapters have impacted me more than I thought they would. That probably means the takeaways are going to be more meaningful for others…at least I hope so.

73

With that, I’ll say 73. Remember to touch a radio every day. If it touches you back, better put a choke on that antenna line!

Welcome to issue 181 of the Random Wire newsletter. I’m glad you’re here.

AllStar guide feedback requested

I’m looking for some experienced AllStar users to help check my work on a guide to getting started with AllStar using AllScan USB Communications Interface devices. It’s posted at Getting Started with AllStarLink 3 and an AllScan UCI and I could use critical feedback.

Hamvention 2026

Hamvention 2026 is sponsored by the Dayton Amateur Radio Association and will be held May 15-17. That means next week’s Random Wire issue 182 will land on the first day of Hamvention, and that means issue 182 will be too late to wish attendees well.

So this week, I'm sending my best wishes to all who will be attending — and I'm already looking forward to hearing what you bring back.

More? See The Adventure Begins in Xenia: Hamvention 2026.

01 Thank You to Cale K4HCK

I discovered that Cale K4HCK and I have something in common: we are both PseudoStaffers with Zero Retries. I also note that his popular website has a very spare design, and keeping things simple has been one of my goals with the EtherHam.com website. Birds of a feather.

This thank you is long overdue. I appreciate Cale’s wonderful contributions to our ham radio community. You might be wondering: what contributions?

• Cale is the brain and energy behind Amateur Radio Weekly: “…an email newsletter featuring links to the most relevant news, projects, technology, videos, and events happening in Ham Radio.” There is always good content to be discovered through his newsletter. I put out a weekly newsletter, so I know how much energy can get invested in this work.

• He also publishes Amateur Radio Daily with ham radio events and news updated several times per week. (If you visit https://daily.hamweekly.com/about/ and scroll down to Technical Details, I absolutely love Cale’s approach to generating and formatting this web-based content. If you want to see one site that influenced his design choices, check out sidebar.io.)

• Net Finder is working toward a future in which every amateur radio net is cataloged in a central directory on the web.

• Grid Mapper works with WSJT-X FT8 to display calling stations’ grids on a map, display previously worked grids on a map, display the station’s grid currently being worked on a map, and information about the station being worked showing up on a side panel. All in real time.

Any one of these deserves a thank you, but all four together? Amazing. I admire his work on behalf of our community, and I'm happy to extend a Random Wire & EtherHam thank you to Cale K4HCK.

02 Featured: Using a TinySA Ultra Frequency Analyzer

If you’ve been curious about spectrum analyzers but assumed they were expensive, complicated lab gear — the TinySA Ultra is a device that changes that calculus. It’s a small, palm-sized unit that connects to your antenna or radio via an SMA connector, sweeps a frequency range you define, and shows you a live graph of signal strength across that range. Taller peaks mean stronger signals. It runs on an internal battery, has a touchscreen, and costs less than 200 US dollars.

Getting started on the device itself is pretty straightforward — power it on with the slider switch, let it boot, and tap into the menu system to set your frequency range and mode. The included telescoping aerial screws into the RF port (there’s also a CAL port, so don’t mix those up), and you’re off. The display shows you markers, frequency range, and signal strength in real time. It’s immediately satisfying to sweep across 2 meters and watch a frequency spike appear when you key up a radio. In the words of Anakin Skywalker in Phantom Menace, you immediately know: It’s working!

The easiest on-ramp, though, is connecting the TinySA Ultra to a Windows PC via USB. A free application called TinySA-App gives you a much larger display, more precise controls, and — the real win — a built-in list of preconfigured band settings. Click the asterisk/snowflake icon next to the COM port selector and you get a menu of preset frequency ranges for common bands (amateur and others). No manual entry required to jump straight to 10 meters, 2 meters, 70 cm, Air band, FM broadcast, and more.

I recorded a short video of a session where I swept through several bands. On 70 cm, I could watch the signal jump when I transmitted from a handheld to one of my AllStar nodes. On 2 meters, two of my node radios showed up as consistent spikes — along with some regularly-spaced signals I wasn’t expecting. Checking the Air band turned up two frequencies with clearly elevated energy around 120 MHz and 132 MHz. One thing to watch: some bands look compressed vertically on the default scale, making it hard to read. Adjusting the vertical scale makes those spikes much more visible.

This is Part 1 of an ongoing series. There’s a lot more to explore — RFI hunting, marker use, and connecting to other software. For the full walkthrough including screenshots and video links, dive in at: Part 1: Using a TinySA Ultra Frequency Analyzer

03 Featured: TIDRADIO TD-H9: Dual Display and APRS

Over on EtherHam, I've posted a hands-on look at the TIDRADIO TD-H9 — a 10-watt GPS/APRS handheld with Bluetooth programming, spectrum analysis, and a color display, all for under $75. The post covers two things the manual doesn't: how to actually get dual display working (it's genuinely non-obvious and requires navigating several interdependent settings in the Odmaster app), and my experience trying to get APRS beaconing working. I got it beaconing in PTT/manual mode, but automatic beaconing remains a work in progress — like a lot of things with a radio this new, the community is still figuring it out.

Bottom line: solid radio, great value, awful manual, waiting for more radio users to help guide the community. Check it out at TIDRADIO TD-H9: Getting Dual Display and APRS Working.

04 Home: Streaming Audio to My Wife’s Room

My goal: FM audio from SDR++ on the iMac to an Ocean Digital WR-390 internet radio over Bluetooth. The WR-390 was already paired with the iMac, and displayed “paused” — which turns out to be normal; it just means the radio is connected and waiting for the iMac to push audio to it. However, although I could get wonderful audio through the iMac speakers, I couldn’t get the audio to the WR-390 speaker.

The situation was a little more complicated than you might think. My audio chain starts with an SDR USB dongle that is taking in the FM-over-the-air radio signal, but it isn’t attached to my iMac. The actual chain looks like this:

SDR —> rtl_tcp.exe (Windows) —> SDR++ (iMac) —> BT —> WR-390

The Windows 11 Pro mini PC is running rtl_tcp.exe, meaning that the SDR signal is sent via TCP to a listening app. In this case, that app is the SDR++ app on my Intel iMac. It sounds great directly on the iMac, but I wanted to push the FM music to my wife’s internet radio. Music has been central to our lives together, and as an elementary music educator, it was part of her daily work for decades.

The first step was going to System Settings → Sound → Output and explicitly selecting the WR-390 as the audio output device. That alone wasn’t enough, because SDR++ maintains its own independent audio sink selection rather than automatically following the macOS system output. A restart of SDR++ was required, after which the WR-390 appeared as an available audio output device within SDR++ itself. Once selected there, audio began flowing to the radio — but at very low volume even with both SDR++ and the WR-390 at maximum. The fix was simple: the macOS system output volume slider (in System Settings → Sound) had been turned down and needed to be brought back up. With that adjusted, the FM audio came through at full, usable, lovely volume.

Who helped me with this? Claude. I got all the pieces put together and working on my own, but got stuck on getting sound out of the WR-390 internet radio. Claude pointed me to the output volume slider in the iMac Sound settings. That was the missing piece.

05 LAN: RustDesk Server on Proxmox — Installation & Client Configuration Guide

Self-Hosted Remote Access with RustDesk

Most of my lab machines run headless, and when one goes offline it used to mean digging out the spare monitor and keyboard. I wrote up a full how-to on running RustDesk Server OSS as a lightweight LXC container on Proxmox — once it’s set up, every machine on the LAN registers against your own server, and you get in through the same RustDesk interface on Windows, Linux, or macOS. No dependency on RustDesk’s public infrastructure.

The guide covers the install script, service verification, grabbing your encryption key, port forwarding (or not, for LAN-only use), and client configuration. There’s also a section on headless Windows machines specifically — fixed passwords, startup behavior, and a virtual display driver that prevents the dreaded 800×600 fallback when there’s no monitor attached.

Full write-up at EtherHam.com: LAN Remote Access with RustDesk Server on Proxmox.

Why Proxmox? I find it pretty handy. I have some services I want to keep but I don’t want to devote an entire hardware stack for that single purpose. Solution? A Linux container on the Proxmox server. I have some services I’m just experimenting with. Again, I don’t want to commit a hardware platform to that one thing, so those are also on my Proxmox box. Spinning up a new container takes moments — not minutes, not hours, and no digging around to find the right power adapter and get the hardware all hooked up. If you like to experiment, or if you have limited space, running a Proxmox server can be very useful.

06 Got a Mac? Use AllStar? Try Transceive

I was honored to help test improvements to the Transceive app by Georges WH6AZ, available on the Mac App Store.

Transceive allows amateur radio operators to connect to their AllStar node from anywhere in the world. Operators can administer linked nodes, monitor traffic, and transmit audio, all from the comfort of their Mac.

I’ve been enjoying testing iterations that ultimately led to these key improvements:

• New: Universal binary (native support for Apple Silicon and Intel). This is a significant milestone. Native Apple Silicon support improves efficiency while ensuring the app remains stable and maintainable on future macOS versions.

• New: Reorder nodes with simple drag and drop

• New: Add a memo to a node entry

• Fix: DNS lookup issues when nodes use non-standard ports

• Update: Authentication updated for AllStar public access

• Improvement: More reliable node reachability indicators (green/red status updates more consistently, with less need to refresh)

The non-standard ports fix was a particularly welcome upgrade, because I run several nodes which means only one of my nodes is on a standard port. I usually use Transceive with a headset connected to my iMac and find the audio outstanding.

There is a more about Transceive to like. Visit the Mac App Store listing to learn more.

Transceive is great software. If you use AllStar and have a Mac, I think you’ll like it. I’m very pleased to award a Random Wire Recommended sticker to Transceive.

07 The Short Stack

Most of these finds are sourced from the feeds published on EtherHam.com.

Radio

• Radioddity PS30 Switching Power Supply – A Review — This SWLing.com post provides a positive review of a switching power supply. I’m seeing it on the Radioddity site for $119.99.

• Radioddity GD-AT10G Review: A High-Power Budget Entry into DMR — “The Radioddity GD-AT10G is a feature-packed handheld radio aimed squarely at amateur radio operators who want to step into the world of DMR (Digital Mobile Radio) without paying premium prices.”

Digital Radio (M17, PSK31)

• OpenRTX v0.4.4 release — New M17-related functions include: metadata text transmission and reception; packet transmission and reception; microphone noise reduction through ADC oversampling (results in a perceptibly better Codec2 behavior).

• Conversational Digital Mode Focus – PSK31 and others — This is a general piece about digital modes used for actual QSOs.

SDR

• SDR controls for Mac and iOS — There are too many individual package announcements to list here. If this is of interest, head over to Mac Ham Radio and browse their most recent posts.

• RTL-SDR.com has a couple of items, too — P25-Survey: A Tool for Scanning and Logging P25 Control Channels with an SDR and Portable ADS-B Receiver Firmware for the ESP32-P4 Based LILYGO T-Display-P4 with RTL-SDR.

• Top SDR Software Applications for Software Defined Radio — This was helpful to me when I went looking for SDR apps for my iMac. Nothing in the App Store looked good to me. It turns out that SDR++ has a package for the iMac, and not just the Apple Silicon iMac, but my Intel iMac, too. Win. “Unlike hardware guides, this page is a deep informational resource—because most SDR software is free or open-source, not sold on Amazon. Here’s the 2026 lineup.” (I’ve added the Radio Hobbyist feed to the list of feeds on EtherHam.)

• Software Defined Radio (SDR): Complete Beginner to Advanced Guide — Also from the Radio Hobbyist website, this is a great resource. “Whether you’re just getting started with an inexpensive USB dongle or building a more advanced setup, SDR opens up a wide range of listening possibilities. This guide brings together everything you need to learn SDR, including beginner-friendly explanations, setup tutorials, real-world use cases, and recommended equipment.”

Antennas

• Ham Radio Portable Insights: Reasons to Consider an End-Fed Half-Wave Antenna — “The big advantage I’ve found using an EFHW in the field is you can pull up to a site and literally be on the air in moments with barely any tuning or fuss. You can tie off the impedance transformer to a handy post or tree a few feet above the ground and then toss the wire over a convenient limb.”

• The Maxpedition Beefy Organizer makes POTA Setup Easy — While nominally about organizing for POTA operations, the gold nugget is how Michael KB9VBR organizes his wire antennas and associated parts —> in banker bags. Simple. Effective. Brilliant.

08 📋Digital Radio News Digest

Executive Summary

Recent developments in amateur radio digital voice and VoIP linking modes include the release of OpenRTX version 0.4.4 for M17, updates to the Pi-Star dashboard for DMR, and various discussions and issues reported on the AllStarLink forum for VoIP linking. The M17 project has seen significant activity, with new features and support added to the m17-gateway and discussions on using the MMDVM_HS_Dual hotspot in M17. The AllStarLink forum has addressed issues with WIFI network selection, custom audio files, and DTMF for DVSwitch.

Per-Mode Breakdown

DMR

The Pi-Star dashboard has been updated with changes to the mmdvmhost functions, including replacing log-tail shell pipelines with PHP fseek+regex and caching config + DMR_Hosts.txt within request. There are also discussions on Reddit about the new AnyTone AT-D890UV and looking for DMRs that can do a PAN connection over Bluetooth.

D-STAR

There is no significant content collected for D-STAR.

YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X

There is a blog post about using the AllScan UCI80M USB Communications Interface paired with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a Motorola speaker-microphone, but no other significant content collected for YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X. (This is pretty funny. First, this references my Random Wire post from last week. Second, the Digital Radio News Gatherer script misclassified this AllStar content as YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X. I have more script modifications to make!)

M17

The OpenRTX version 0.4.4 has been released, with updates to the m17-gateway, including support for the SX1255 HAT and an experimental messaging bridge. There are also discussions on the M17 Users Groups.io about using the MMDVM_HS_Dual hotspot in M17, connecting to the M17 reflector, and recommendations for M17 UHF frequencies.

VoIP Linking

The AllStarLink forum has addressed issues with WIFI network selection, custom audio files, and DTMF for DVSwitch. There are also updates to the app_rpt and amp-server repositories on GitHub, including changes to the chan_echolink module and support for serial controls. A Reddit user has also built a modern AllStarLink and EchoLink client and is looking for beta testers.

Notable Firmware or Software Updates

• OpenRTX version 0.4.4

• Pi-Star dashboard updates (commit ce0ea3dc, commit 3984e758, commit bc5a05a5, commit 437d34e6, commit 73cc3458)

• app_rpt updates (commit 0dec2b0e, commit 57e28c48)

• amp-server updates (commit f4beffd4, commit 5fb78034, commit 4f850733, commit 6d19b78d)

Cross-Mode Developments

There are no significant cross-mode developments reported in the collected items.

Last run: 2026-05-07 15:18 UTC -- 54 items collected. Download the collected items at https://etherham.com/download/179600844/?tmstv=1778167585

09 📡Band Conditions This Week

First: Sunspot Numbers

If you’ve been noticing that the sunspot number reported in this digest differs from what your HamClock is telling you, you are absolutely right: they are different. There is a reason. Reported sunspot numbers vary depending on the source. This digest uses the NOAA/USAF daily count, which tallies individual sunspot groups from their own observer network. HamClock and many online dashboards display the SIDC International Sunspot Number, which applies a different weighting formula across a global network of observatories — typically producing a higher figure. Both are valid. The simplified view: they're just measuring the same sun with different rulers.

The same underlying measurement, two different scales

Both numbers are counting the same thing: sunspots, using the classic Wolf formula — R = k(10g + s) — where g is the number of sunspot groups, s is the total individual spots, and k is a personal correction factor for the observer’s equipment and technique. The difference isn’t what they count, it’s how they’re calibrated and aggregated.

Where NOAA/USAF gets its number

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) produces what’s often called the “Boulder sunspot number.” It comes from observations at a single reference point (historically the USAF/NOAA network centered in Boulder, Colorado), using their own observers and equipment with their own calibration coefficients. Numbers from individual stations — including the Boulder number — are often 20 to 50% higher than the International Sunspot Number. This isn’t an error; it’s a calibration difference rooted in history.

Where SIDC gets its number

The SIDC International Sunspot Number results from a statistical treatment of data originating from more than 25 observing stations worldwide, with the Locarno station serving as the reference to guarantee continuity with the historical Zürich series. By aggregating across a global network and normalizing everything through that reference station, the SIDC number is inherently a consensus average — smoothed across many observers and sites.

The 0.6 factor — the core of the mystery

This is where it gets interesting from a history-of-science standpoint. Back in 1849, Rudolf Wolf deliberately chose to ignore the smallest short-lived spots and internal spot structure (multiple umbrae in a large common penumbra), even though he could see them perfectly well, in order to keep his counts compatible with earlier crude telescopic observations.

His successor Alfred Wolfer disagreed with that approach and started counting everything he could see. His counts were systematically higher. But they ran parallel observations for 17 years — long enough to derive a stable ratio. To bring the new higher counts to Wolf’s scale, they had to be multiplied by a factor of 0.6. Since that time, all modern raw sunspot counts used to produce the sunspot number have been multiplied by this constant 0.6 factor.

The SIDC applies this 0.6 factor consistently across its network. Individual stations like Boulder, if they don’t apply it (or apply a different k), will read systematically higher.

The 2015 SIDC recalibration (Version 2.0) — added confusion

Things got more complicated in 2015 when SIDC released a major revision of the historical record. The biggest difference in the revised series is an overall increase by a factor of 1.6 applied to the entire historical series. This was essentially the inverse of removing a correction factor that had been improperly applied for decades. The upshot: NOAA/SWPC recalibrated its prediction coefficients in 2019 to be consistent with Version 2 of the International Sunspot Number.

So NOAA’s official long-term predictions now reference SIDC V2, but their daily operational Boulder number is still produced separately on its own scale.

What this means for you practically

When you see, say, 185 on HamClock (SIDC) and 210-220 on your propagation checker (NOAA/Boulder), they’re both describing the same sun on the same day — just measured on slightly different scales. For ham radio propagation purposes, the relative trends matter far more than the absolute numbers. Both will tell you the same story: we’re past the Solar Cycle 25 peak, conditions on 10-12-15 meters have been excellent, and we’re watching for the gradual decline. Neither number is “wrong.”

The practical takeaway: don’t try to mentally convert between the two on the fly. Just learn which number your favorite propagation tools use and calibrate your expectations to that scale. If HamClock says 150 and conditions are good, 150 is your mental reference point for “good” — regardless of what NOAA reports.

I hope this helps you understand why you sometimes see two very different measures of sunspot numbers. (Hat tip to Claude for assistance in crafting this explanation.)

CORRECTION

After publishing the above explanation, I reviewed it more carefully and concluded: it was incorrect. Following is my correction, inserted into issue 181 after publication.

A correction on sunspot numbers

In a recent issue I included an explanation of why HamClock and other propagation tools sometimes show different sunspot numbers. The historical background — the Wolf formula, the Wolfer parallel observations, the 0.6 calibration factor, the SIDC global network versus the NOAA/Boulder single-station approach — was accurate. But I got the conclusion exactly backwards, and that’s the part you actually use.

I wrote that HamClock (SIDC) would typically show a higher number than NOAA/Boulder. The opposite is true: NOAA/Boulder has historically run 20 to 50 percent higher than the SIDC International Sunspot Number — a fact the SIDC documents plainly on their own FAQ page.

There’s a wrinkle that muddies the water further. In 2015, SIDC released a major revision of their historical data series (Version 2.0). The most significant change was removing the 0.6 Zürich scale factor that had been applied for over a century, effectively resetting the SIDC series to the scale of raw modern counts. This made V2.0 numbers roughly 1.6 times larger than V1.0 numbers across the board. NOAA recalibrated its long-term prediction models to V2.0 in 2019, but the daily operational Boulder number is still produced on its own separate scale — and the relationship between the two in day-to-day use doesn’t follow a simple fixed rule.

The practical upshot, confirmed by real-world observation: on any given day, HamClock (SIDC) will often show a higher number than a propagation tool pulling the NOAA/Boulder daily figure. Today, for example, HamClock reported 68 while my propagation script reported 61. The original article had that exactly backwards.

The core advice still stands: don’t try to mentally convert between the two on the fly. Pick one scale, learn what “good conditions” looks like on that scale, and stick with it. The trends are what matter for ham radio purposes, and both sources will tell you the same story about where we are in the solar cycle.

Apologies for the error.

Second: Not My Band Propagation Summary

This comes from the Northern Lights Alerts group on Facebook:

A cluster of coronal hole “blobs” on the Sun is now rotating into an Earth‑facing position, and one of the western features is expected to become geoeffective within the next 24 hours. These regions release high‑speed solar wind streams that can disturb Earth’s magnetic field and create aurora activity even without major solar storms or official G‑scale watches.

Right now, space weather models suggest G0–G1 conditions (Kp 4–5) are possible from today through Friday. While this is not a major geomagnetic storm, it is exactly the kind of setup that often produces surprise aurora bursts, especially when the solar wind speed increases and the Bz tilts south for sustained periods. Coronal hole activity is known for creating long, steady pulses of aurora rather than explosive CME‑style storms, but these pulses can still light up the sky beautifully.

Finally: My Propagation Report

• Solar Flux Index (SFI): 155.0 — Excellent — upper HF bands wide open

• K-Index (current): 1.0 — Quiet — excellent conditions

• K-Index (7-day max): 6.3 — Storm conditions — significant HF disruption

• A-Index: 11 — Unsettled (predicted)

• Sunspot Number (NOAA/USAF): 39

• Active Solar Regions: 9

With an SFI of 155 and a current K-index of just 1, the upper HF bands — 10, 12, and 15 meters in particular — are wide open and worth a serious look for both DX and domestic contacts right now. That said, don’t let today’s quiet conditions fool you into thinking it’s been a smooth week; a max K-index of 6.3 tells us a geomagnetic storm rolled through and likely rattled the lower HF bands for a stretch, so if you’ve been frustrated with 40 or 80 meters lately, that’s probably why. The predicted A-index of 11 suggests a touch of unsettledness still lingering, but with nine active solar regions on the disk keeping that flux elevated, conditions are trending in a direction most of us are happy to see.

Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov). Generated: 2026-05-07 15:10 UTC

10 📻This Week in Radio History

Notable events from May 4 through May 8 across the years.

1933 — Armstrong Demonstrates Wideband FM

Edwin Howard Armstrong publicly demonstrated wideband frequency modulation (FM) and filed key patent applications that would later be granted through the late 1930s. His system dramatically reduced static and noise compared to AM broadcasting, making high-fidelity radio practical for the first time.

Armstrong’s work eventually transformed commercial broadcasting and influenced generations of amateur radio operators. Decades later, FM repeaters built by hams in the 1970s became the backbone of local VHF and UHF communication networks still used today for public service and emergency communication.

1945 — VE Day and the Return of Amateur Radio

On May 8, 1945, the Allied celebration of Victory in Europe Day marked more than the end of the war in Europe. For amateur radio operators, it signaled the gradual return of civilian radio activity after years of wartime shutdowns and restrictions.

Many amateurs had served as military radio operators, engineers, and instructors during the war. When peace returned, they brought home new technical skills and access to surplus equipment that fueled an extraordinary postwar boom in amateur radio experimentation. The years that followed saw rapid growth in VHF operation, weak-signal experimentation, mobile radio, and eventually FM repeater systems.

1950s — The Foundations of Packet Radio

During the 1950s, researchers and radio experimenters began exploring digital communication techniques that would eventually influence packet radio and computer networking over the air. While amateur packet radio would not fully emerge until decades later, the ideas taking shape during this era laid the groundwork for digital modes that hams would later embrace.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, amateur operators adapted these concepts into practical systems using the AX.25 protocol, opening the door to keyboard messaging, bulletin board systems, APRS, and early wireless networking experiments long before Wi-Fi became commonplace.

1970s — The Amateur Satellite Era Expands

The mid-1970s marked a period of rapid growth in amateur satellite communication following the success of the early OSCAR satellites. Organizations such as AMSAT helped drive innovation in small satellite design, telemetry, and low-power communication systems.

For many radio amateurs, working through an orbiting satellite became both a technical challenge and a glimpse into the future of personal space-based communication. Amateur satellite programs also inspired generations of students, engineers, and experimenters who later contributed to commercial and scientific space programs.

Looking Back

Radio history is filled with moments where experimentation by individuals and amateurs eventually reshaped global communication. From Armstrong’s fight to prove FM viable to the rise of packet radio and amateur satellites, innovations once considered experimental often became essential tools for communication around the world.

History note: Dates and milestones are drawn from historical records and may reflect broader developments that unfolded over months or years rather than a single day. (Hat tip to ChatGPT and Claude for assisting in researching these items.)

11 Opinion: AI Advancing at the Speed of Fright

I was thinking about this topic when I listened to the latest Ham Radio Workbench podcast that includes a lot of back-and-forth about using artificial intelligence engines. I think the overall tone was: this is a positive step but we have concerns, even misgivings.

What does seem clear is that AI is here to stay. The AI genie is out of the bottle and we’re not going to be able to put it back. Our choices boil down to: ignore it (head in the sand tactic), use it (grudgingly learn to live with it), or embrace it (use it for more than simple chats and web searches).

I’m in the embrace it camp, even though I have concerns. (I’m probably one of those I don’t want to be left behind people.) I’m worried about unethical uses of this powerful technology. In my email inbox, I’m already seeing much more sophisticated attempts to get me to do things that may not be good for me or others. It’s getting harder to see at first glance which emails or website comments are real and which are generated by bad actors using AI.

I use AI to help with structuring content. Specifically, the book project I’m working on was simply a giant whirling mess in my mind until I asked ChatGPT and Claude for help. Claude asked me questions for an hour and then produced a very detailed structure for the book. That helped immensely as now when a key memory resurfaces, I know where to plug it into the manuscript.

I also use AI for proofreading and some editing, but I often “re-voice” what an AI suggests. I also notice both ChatGPT and Claude really like the em dash — so now, when I see that, the first thing I wonder is: did an AI write that content? Unfortunately or fortunately — depending on your point of view — I have tended to use em dashes in my writing for many years. To me, it more closely reflects how I think and speak. (My use of the em dash is not grammatically correct in that I add a space before and after the dash — like that. Without that space, it looks too much like a shortened-and-hyphenated phrase.)

I run a large language model engine on my Raspberry Pi 5 and yes, it is limited and slow. I also run an LLM on my Proxmox server where I have more capacity, but it is also pretty slow. I need a computer with a modern GPU; my Proxmox box is too old and so all AI work is done by the main CPU. Of course, since AI is advancing so rapidly (at the speed of fright!) by the time I save up for a capable machine, it won’t be capable any longer.

It feels like we are at a turning point in human history. We discovered fire. We learned to farm. We harnessed the power of steam, electricity, and fossil fuels. We became manufacturing wizards. The computer age landed and shook the world. Now AI is doing the same thing. It is happening fast, and yes, it is a bit frightening. With great power comes great responsibility and I pray that we can live up to our potential as good humans.

12 QRT End Transmission

Time to close the channel.

Thank you, subscribers (yes: you!)

The Random Wire newsletter has seen steady growth since I launched it in 2022:

Notably, this week total subscribers climbed over the 2,200 mark. I’ve said before that I try not to look at the subscriber numbers very often. I don’t want a number to influence what I write about, or how I present that information. Nevertheless, 2,200 feels like a milestone of sorts. Thank you. As always, I am happy to hear your ideas for topics and improvement.

It feels good to write

The longer I write within our amateur radio community, the more familiar it becomes. You get to know some leading lights and also work with less experienced hams who need a hand from time to time. It’s a great feeling to help others.

I remember when I first started. My Kenwood TS-520S HF radio had been well loved, and the ham who sold it to me (W7FBI, now SK) gave me a really, really good deal, including some extra vacuum tubes. Gary AC7VA gave me a manual antenna tuner. I built a small OCF antenna and strung it from the eave of the house to an old sailboat mast strapped to a fence post. The list goes on, and I used all of that low-and-no-cost gear as I got started in amateur radio.

In retrospect, I think it was those experiences that contributed to me wanting to help other hams. It is very satisfying to contribute to the hobby by helping to lift fellow hams. The very best part is getting to know others in our hobby: learning what they are doing, how they got started, what they are struggling with, and successes they’ve enjoyed. It’s really not about radio — it’s about you.

73

With that, I’ll say 73. Remember to touch a radio every day.

Welcome, radio friends. There is a strange bit of synchronicity as I write issue 180 —where I feature the AllScan UCI80M — and subscribers just went past the 2,180 mark. The number 80 seems powerful in my universe today!

Thank you to David WD5M

I’m once again monitoring the ISS over AllStar node 516221. I find it a bit addictive, probably because it was hearing live radio from space that sparked my interest in ham radio in the first place. Many thanks to David McAnally WD5M for providing this node. He does a lot, including:

• Streaming the ARNewsLine® reports on AllStar node 516228. See https://newsline.rfnet.link/ for more.

• Streaming the ARRL Audio News on AllStar node 516229. See

  https://arrlnews.rfnet.link/ for more.

• Providing the SPACE Mission Audio page and streaming services.

I use these services every week. Thank you, David.

This Week

Featured in this week’s issue of the Random Wire is the AllScan UCI80M USB Communications Interface from an end-user’s point of view. How does it sound? The UCI80M and Motorola speaker-mic package sounds good. You won’t be disappointed.

I spent enough time on the UCI80M piece that I ran out of time to follow-up on the TinySA and NanoVNA-H4. Those remain on the “to do” list for a future Random Wire issue.

New articles on EtherHam.com this week:

• Going Digital: Choosing Your First Voice Mode

• An Unassuming Little Box That Runs AI

• Ollama + Open WebUI Setup on Proxmox

• Inside EtherHam: April 2026

01 Featured: AllScan UCI80M AllStar Node

Recently, I purchased a new AllStar node device from AllScan.info. The units available from AllScan are designed by David Gleason NR9V. I am consistently impressed with the quality of his builds and how well they handle audio.

The UCI80M

I do love a small, capable device. As soon as I recognized the diminutive size of the UCI80M, I bought one. UCI stands for USB Communications Interface. The M stands for Motorola. The UCI80M is a small USB device that attaches to a computing device like a PC or Raspberry Pi, and uses a Motorola M-1 speaker-microphone for TX and RX audio.

David writes:

The UCI80M has the same features as the UCI80 but connects to Motorola M1 Speaker-Mics such as the PMMN4013A and PMMN4029A, which have several advantages over K1 speaker-mics: Genuine Motorola speaker-mics are easy to find at lower prices than similar quality K1 speaker-mics, and have outstanding audio quality, wind resistance, and durability; The PMMN4029A is waterproof, the PMMN4013A provides an extra 3.5mm audio jack; M1 connectors do not share a common ground between the speaker and mic, supporting bridge-configuration audio amps and up to 4x higher output volume and less distortion.

If you appreciate a beautiful schematic, the layout for the UCI80M is available on the AllScan.info website.

The audio? It’s good. Here’s a quick test to the Enhanced Parrot node 55553:

My UCI80M Stack

My AllStar node 588412 consists of a UCI80M USB Communications Interface, a Raspberry Pi 4 in an iUniker fanless case, and a TalentCell battery. These pieces are held together with some clear Alien Tape. The Motorola M-1 speaker-microphone rounds out the package.

The iUniker case

This simple, boxy case was sourced on Amazon for $10:

iUniker Aluminiun Pi 4 Case Passive Heatsink Cooler for Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB/4GB/2GB (affiliate link)

I’ve tried many Pi cases and find that I gravitate toward box-like shapes because the other major pieces are usually similarly shaped. That makes it easier to stack them.

I’ll touch on cooling the Raspberry Pi 4 in a moment.

The TalentCell battery

Most people probably would not use the battery I selected. It is, after all, relatively large, compared to the compact UCI80M and the Raspberry Pi 4. But it has proven to be reliable and long lasting. I’d like it to be a bit smaller, but at the same time, I appreciate that I don’t need to worry about how long it will last.

The TalentCell model YB1206000-USB lithium-ion battery takes 12-volt direct current (VDC) input and outputs 5 VDC. I have found you have to be careful selecting which TalentCell battery you choose, because some produce 9 volts out, some output 12 volts, and one has only one port for both charging and output. (When there is only one port and it does double duty, you can’t charge the battery while using it to power the Pi.) The YB1206000-USB, with 6000 mAh of capacity, provides 5 VDC out, just right for powering the Pi. (An alternative battery choice is the TalentCell YB1208300-USB with 8300 mAh capacity, 12 VDC input, and 5 VDC output.)

The battery has enough capacity to operate the node all day (most of the time, the node draws very little while in receive mode). What do I like about it? It puts out 5 VDC, has plenty of capacity, and I can disconnect the DC charger without causing the Raspberry Pi 4 to shutdown or reboot.

The position of the rocker switch on the TalentCell battery is important. Per the manual, position “I” turns the output power on, and it must be in this position during charging. Position “O” turns it off, which also serves to prevent battery drain during storage. I leave the battery turned on all the time.

Connecting the pieces

Connections between the battery (or other power source), the Raspberry Pi 4, and the UCI80M are simple: a cable to charge the battery, a cable to power the Pi, and a cable to power and move data through the UCI80M:

• 12 VDC comes from a charger through a barrel jack into the battery.

• A USB-A to USB-C cable from the battery provides power to the Raspberry Pi 4.

• A USB-A to USB-C cable with ferrite from the Pi to the UCI80M provides power and serves as the two-way data conduit.

• Audio in and out is through the Motorola PMMN4013A speaker-microphone.

I can disconnect the DC charger and carry it to a different place in the house. Using the Motorola speaker-mic, the quality of my transmitted audio is very good. The received audio I hear through the speaker-mic sounds better to me than the Kenwood K-1 speaker-mics I’ve been using with other AllScan nodes.

The Motorola speaker-mic

The PMMN4013A speaker-mic has an IP54 rating, an audio jack and “Windporting technology,” a Motorola term:

Windporting eliminates the whining and howling sounds of wind blowing across your remote speaker microphone while preventing water from clogging the microphone, resulting in clearer transmissions.

The audio jack is behind a small cover on the speaker-mic and takes a 3.5mm plug, so you can enjoy private listening when needed. (Motorola calls it discreet listening: “This RSM [Remote Speaker Microphone] also features a 3.5 mm audio jack that allows you to connect a receive-only earpiece for discreet communication.”) Volume is controlled by the UCI80M, not on the speaker-mic.

At first glance, the Motorola M-1 connector resembles the Kenwood K-1 connector, but they are not interchangeable.

Compact and capable

For me, this little AllStar layer cake — UCI80M, Raspberry Pi 4, and TalentCell battery — is small enough to fit on a shelf.

I mentioned above I was going to talk about cooling the Raspberry Pi 4. The iUniker case has no fan and serves as a passive radiator for excess heat. Covering some of the top fins might, I thought, compromise cooling. But I’ve been monitoring it with an infrared heat gun, my fingers, and the command line, and it’s been fine. The UCI80M puts very little load on the system.

Measured load on RX is quite light. The btop report shown below was collected during long QSOs on node 47970, the W3QV repeater in Roxborough, PA.

Here’s the btop report (click here to learn more about btop):

Bandwidth of the connection is shown in the lower left box. Memory consumption/availability is the box above that, and disk space is the other box in the lower left. Processes are shown in the lower right box. CPU usage is shown in the long, horizontal box at the top of the btop screen.

Power Consumption

In thinking about what I wrote earlier — “The battery has enough capacity to operate the node all day” — I realized that general statement was not particularly helpful. I needed to measure power draw.

What follows in this section is, ultimately, a faulty set of conclusions. I’m including all of my reasoning here so you can see how focusing on the numbers can result in ignoring something like usable capacity of the year-old battery. On with the measurements and calculations.

To measure power draw, I used a Klein Tool ET920 USB Digital Meter to measure the voltage being supplied to the UCI80M and the current. Unfortunately, the ET920 does not pass data, so I was unable to assess power consumption while transmitting. (And in thinking about it, I wasn’t measuring draw during RX, either. More on that in a moment.) However, at idle, I measured just 60 milliamps being consumed by the UCI80M.

(A couple of notes about the Klein Tools ET920. This device is quite small. It does not function as a cross-over unit, meaning you have to match the input and output USB style, i.e., USB-A input goes only to USB-A output. It also does not pass data. I found that the packaging requires very careful deconstruction to get the instructions out undamaged. Translation: I damaged the instructions. I’ll be sure to give that feedback to Klein Tools!)

Klein Tools ET920 USB Power Meter, USB-A and USB-C Digital Meter for Voltage, Current, Capacity, Energy and Resistance (affiliate link)

With a 6000 mAh battery and 60 milliamps of current draw, and assuming about 80% useful capacity of the battery before performance falls off, that’s about 80 hours of continuous receive performance available. Battery life will be reduced with transmissions, but I doubt consumption is more than about 1 amp. Since most node usage is RX, this stack should have at least two to three days of continuous working time.

But here’s where my reasoning went awry. Since the Klein ET920 doesn’t pass data, that means I was not measuring power draw during receive. All I was measuring was the idle power draw of the UCI80M — not its consumption during actual receive operation. I reached out to the maker, David Gleason, who said:

The power consumption during Rx i.e. when the audio amp is driving a speaker will vary greatly depending on the volume setting and speaker impedance. The audio amp can output 2.5W and thus a UCI could theoretically use as much as about 600mA, but audio signals typically have short peaks and relatively low average power and at normal home listening levels the UCI shouldn't draw much more than 100mA. Even at very high volumes it should not average any more than 300mA with a 3Ω load, or with speaker-mics which are more like a 16 or 32 Ω total average power consumption even at max volume should be well under 1W (5V x 200mA).

Therefore, since I’m using a speaker-mic, my power consumption during operation will likely be between 60 mA (idle) and 200 mA (max volume). If I assume 200 mA draw and 80% capacity of the battery, the stack should last for a day.

As a test of this assumption, I unplugged the charger at 0800 Pacific on April 28th. It stopped registering on AllStarLink.org at 2026-04-29 12:03 UTC, which converts to 0503 Pacific April 29th. Real-world performance: about 21 hours of continuous service.

While the power draw is still relatively low, real-world performance did not exactly match my expectation. That, of course, is why one does a real-world test: to make sure assumptions and calculations are valid. In this case, they are not.

What are the variables? Power draw was estimated, so it could be off. Usable battery capacity was also a guess since this battery has been in continuous service for a year. I suspect the battery has lost significant capacity over the past year of use.

The lesson: measure under real conditions, not assumptions.

Raspberry Pi 4 Temperatures

I was also curious about the Raspberry Pi 4 CPU temperature. I found that vcgencmd is included with the Debian 13 operating system, so I used it to look at the CPU and PMIC temperatures. (The Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 use dedicated Power Management Integrated Circuits — PMICs — to manage voltage regulation, sequencing, and monitoring.)

In the screenshot below, you can see that the ARM CPU is running at 40.4°C and the PMIC is at 37.4°C.

The instantaneous frequency measurement shows the ARM CPU is running just above idle at 700 MHz instead of running at its maximum frequency of 1.8 GHz. The vcgencmd command is worth having in your set of tools for working with Raspberry Pi 4 and 5 computers.

But How Does It Sound?

The UCI80M and Motorola speaker-mic package sounds good.

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of two of my nodes. The one on the left is running Ampersand-ASL on a Dell Wyse 3040 mini PC, through an AllScan UCI90 USB Communications Interface, with a genuine Kenwood K-1 speaker-microphone.

The node on the right is running AllStarLink 3 on a Raspberry Pi 4, through an AllScan UCI80M USB Communications Interface, with a genuine Motorola M-1 speaker-mic.

Please excuse the shaky video: I was holding the smartphone in my hand and simultaneously trying to adjust the volume knobs and keep things framed and focused. (Note to self: next time, use the tripod!)

Bottom line: both platforms provide clean, crisp, clear audio. To my ears, the Motorola sounds slightly better. But this is very much a matter of taste, because both work and sound great. I have no hesitation about using either of them at any time. One sits beside my standing desk in the corner of the living room. The other sits on the supply table next to my wife’s hospital bed in the sun room.

I monitor both quite often. I think you’ll be pleased with them, no matter which one you choose. Find out more at https://allscan.info/products/.

02 HamDash Is Improving

The HamDash app — available at https://hamdash.com — has been improving steadily, week by week. It’s now a regular stop when I’m thinking about getting on the air and while I’m operating on HF.

One of the nice additions is the ability to change the text size. In the screenshot below, I’ve set the font to “large,” making it easier for my eyes to read without reaching for my reading glasses.

If you look at the menu choices to the right of the blue-ish Dashboard button, you’ll get a good idea of the range of content available.

03 Ollama LLM on Proxmox LXC

I’ve been playing with Ollama — a large language model engine — on the Raspberry Pi 5. With 16 GB of RAM, the RPi 5 is the most capable Pi in my lab.

And then I wondered: can I install Ollama into an LXC on my Proxmox machine? That platform has an i7 CPU and 64 GB of RAM, so it should have enough horsepower to do better than the Pi.

I found an Ollama machine installation script at https://community-scripts.org/ and installed it. Then I asked Claude about installing Open WebUI for a chat interface with Ollama. We got that done by installing Open WebUI into the same LXC that Ollama was running in. The Open WebUI screen is rather plain, but I am looking for functionality, not decoration.

Then I installed and tried several different LLMs. I looked at the llama3.1:8b model — very capable, given the limitations of my hardware. I tried phi3, a smaller model, which was quick but tended to hallucinate (it kept answering as if I was reading a science fiction novel). I ran mistral which seemed too slow; I ended up removing it. And I tested gemma3:4b.

In the Ollama + Open WebUI Setup on Proxmox article on EtherHam, I summarize the three models I kept on the machine.

gemma3:4b — Recommended for Conversational and Factual Tasks

gemma3:4b is the recommended default for focused, shorter interactions:

• Best factual accuracy: Gemma 3 was specifically tuned by Google to reduce hallucination.

• Self-aware responses: Reliably acknowledges the limits of its knowledge rather than fabricating answers.

• Good reasoning quality: Responses are well-structured and thorough compared to same-size alternatives.

• Limitation — context window: Default context window is 4096 tokens. Prompts containing large blocks of pasted text may cause the model to stall or time out. Use llama3.1:8b for document-length tasks.

llama3.1:8b — Recommended for Document-Length Tasks

llama3.1:8b is the better choice when working with longer content:

• Larger context window: 8192 tokens by default, making it suitable for proofreading articles, summarizing documents, and reviewing longer technical content.

• General purpose: Solid quality across coding, writing, and analysis tasks.

• More verbose: Tends to produce longer responses than gemma3:4b, which may or may not be desirable depending on the task.

• Slower: At 4.9 GB on CPU-only inference, response times are longer than gemma3:4b or phi3.

phi3:latest — Recommended for Speed-Critical Tasks

phi3 is the fastest model in the stable and is useful when response time matters more than depth:

• Fastest response: Smallest footprint at ~2.2 GB; optimized by Microsoft for edge deployment.

• Good for quick lookups: Short factual questions, quick code snippets, or rapid brainstorming.

• Lower quality ceiling: Less thorough than gemma3:4b or llama3.1:8b on complex or nuanced prompts.

You can dive much deeper into the installation, configuration, and management of these models in Ollama + Open WebUI Setup on Proxmox.

04 APRS on the ISS

I caught myself thinking: I should dig out my handheld VHF/UHF yagi antenna and try to work the ISS over APRS! I started researching…and found out I can’t. The last APRS contact was with KC5ILO-10 on 2026-04-23 at 21:53:46 UTC.

The posted status message: “Please note we're still in the process of troubleshooting and testing this radio.”

If you’ve been trying to make contact with the ISS using APRS, please be aware the Kenwood D710GA transceiver is not working correctly. Hopefully, the crew will get this sorted soon.

Resources

• ISS Ham Radio Status

• Welcome to the ARISS APRS Status Page

05 The Ongoing Saga of WiRES-X

I wish I could report that the upgrade to WiRES-X 2.0 was a positive change for everyone, but I can’t. Evidence? America’s Kansas City Wide network is not upgrading to WiRES-X 2.0 at this time because of compatibility issues:

06 AllStar Without Asterisk

This is a very interesting project. I’m currently running two implementations: Ampersand-ASL Server on a Dell Wyse 3040 with an AllScan USB interface, and Ampersand-ASL Server on my Windows laptop. (I mentioned Ampersand-ASL above at the end of the Featured: AllScan UCI80M AllStar Node piece.)

Ampersand ASL is the brainchild of Bruce MacKinnon KC1FSZ. (If you visit his QRZ page, just keep scrolling. It is chock full of interesting projects!) When I heard about it, I reached out to find out how I could help test it. The idea of AllStar without Asterisk was a bit mind-blowing, and I admit I was skeptical. But it works well.

One of the unique aspects of this project is how compact the total system size is. Without Asterisk, it makes the software footprint quite small.

On the project’s GitHub page, you can see activity in several different Amp-ASL approaches. My two implementations are amp-server and amp-win. Bruce’s work has tailed off a bit recently, and my guess is he got temporarily pulled away from Amp-ASL development.

amp-win

On my Windows computer, amp-win starts as Ampersand.exe which opens a terminal window:

Once the system has loaded (just a few seconds), I open a browser to 127.0.0.1:8080 to see the Amp-ASL Server. In the captured video below, I connect to the Amp-ASL Parrot, then make two test transmissions:

For this test, I used Soundbrenner Wave in-ear audio monitors with an accessory boom microphone. (There is also an audio sample available for Ampersand-ASL Server running on a Dell Wyse 3040, found near the bottom of the featured article above about the AllScan UCI80M.)

I find this Windows implementation of ASL very convenient when I’m traveling. With a pair of Bluetooth headphones, I can listen to QSOs directly over my computer. I do find that my transmitted audio with BT phones is often very low. Hard-wired phones with a boom mic close to my mouth seem to work the best.

These are still early days for this software, so there are a few rough edges. For example, if you disconnect your earbuds or headphones while Amp-ASL is running, it often crashes the program. The workaround: make sure your buds or phones are the ones you want to use, then start Ampersand.exe, then open your browser. Good to go.

Want to try this? Directions are available at Ampersand Windows Server User/Install Documentation. Bruce writes:

To avoid any confusion: this program provides a full ASL node that is capable of placing outgoing calls and receiving incoming calls. You do not need to have a second Linux server. This is experimental work that explores the potential of ASL linking without the use of the Asterisk PBX system. Project documentation is here.

amp-asl on 3040

I’m also running Amp-ASL on a Dell Wyse 3040 mini PC, with audio piped through an AllScan UCI90 USB Communications Interface and a K-1 speaker-microphone. I manage node connections with the AllScan favorites management app running on the 3040 and accessed through my browser. Works great.

For this implementation, I start with the directions at amp-server and then jumped to the install documentation linked above.

amp-hub

Interestingly, there is also an Ampersand Hub implementation aimed at headless servers like in a server farm or cloud hosting service. Details are available on the amp-hub page.

Will It Run on Other Raspberry Pi Platforms?

One of Bruce’s test platforms has been a Raspberry Pi 5. I wonder if his Amp-ASL system would run on the diminutive Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W? Architecturally, the Pi 5 CPU is similar to that used in the Zero 2 W. The main differences are in clock speed and amount of RAM available.

This might be an interesting experiment. I worked through some details with ChatGPT and the speed difference makes a Pi Zero 2 W unworkable for a hub node (where hub means many nodes connected simultaneously). It might work okay for a single node connection, but it’s probably best to consider this experimental. With the Pi 5, downsampling takes about ~25 µs (microseconds); with the Pi Zero 2 W, the same downsampling would take about ~100–200 µs, primarily because of the slower clock speed. It might work. Might.

I asked ChatGPT to postulate how Amp-ASL might run on different Raspberry Pi computers:

The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W can run Ampersand-ASL, but it operates much closer to the edge of what the software requires. Its quad-core Cortex-A53 at 1 GHz is capable of handling the basic real-time audio pipeline—packet handling, filtering, and playback—but with far less headroom than the Cortex-A76 cores in the Raspberry Pi 5. In practice, that means a Zero 2 W is best suited for a very small, lightly loaded node: a single connection or perhaps a couple of users, modest audio rates, and minimal additional features. It should be viewed as an embedded endpoint or experimental platform rather than a general-purpose hub.

Stepping up the ladder, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ sits in a similar architectural class (also Cortex-A53), but with a higher clock speed and better I/O, giving it a bit more breathing room than the Zero 2 W—enough for a small, practical node with a handful of connections if you’re careful. The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is a much more capable middle ground, thanks to its Cortex-A72 cores and higher clock speeds; it can comfortably handle multiple streams and typical node duties without constantly riding the real-time limits. At the top end, the Raspberry Pi 5 provides ample headroom for Ampersand-ASL’s DSP workload, making it the best fit for production use, higher connection counts, and future expansion. In short: Zero 2 W for minimal endpoints, Pi 3+ for modest nodes, Pi 4 for solid everyday use, and Pi 5 for anything you don’t want to think twice about.

Those two paragraphs are AI-assisted, so consider them informed estimates rather than definitive guidance.

07 The Short Stack

Radio

• Power Cord Green Goo - Plasticizer Migration In Vintage Electronics — “The phenomenon of "green goo" or "green slime" oozing from the power cords of vintage electronics is a well-documented nuisance in the world of retro-audio and antique radio restoration.”

• The TIDRADIO TD-H9 in Black: A Deep Dive into the Most Feature-Packed Handheld Radio Under $70 — “So when TIDRADIO released the TD-H9, I was skeptical. Could a sub $70 radio really deliver GPS, APRS, Bluetooth programming, a spectrum analyzer, and 10 watts of output power? After several weeks of real-world testing from urban environments to remote backcountry trails. I can confidently say: yes, it can.” I ordered the one at this affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4deltky.

• zBitx v2: The 5 watts, all bands, all mode SDR in your pocket for $269 — I had not realized the zBitx now had a version 2 edition until I read the Zero Retries newsletter.

• Building A Ham Radio Data Transceiver On The Cheap — While not new (from last October), this is still interesting. It uses an All-In-One-Cable (AIOC) and DigiPi software.

• Ham Radio in the Internet Age (2024) — “Some old hams say the Internet is ruining ham radio. I say it is changing ham radio just like it has changed virtually everything else. Some of those changes aren’t that drastic anyway.”

Computing / AI

• Your Chrome new tab page is a vibe coding project waiting to happen — I’m going to have to try this.

• The Best Laptops for Older Adults — These devices are probably good candidates for amateur radio operators, not because they are older adults, but because the laptops feature ease of use, visual clarity, and reliability.

• You don’t need a Raspberry Pi for most “Pi projects”—here’s what you can use instead — As previously noted in many places, prices for Raspberry Pi single-board computers (SBCs) are climbing, making the jump to a more capable mini PC a more reasonable proposition.

• Picking your first local LLM is easier than the internet makes it sound — “Choosing your first model is the part that trips everyone up. But once you understand what you're looking at, it becomes really easy.”

• What is a Large Language Model (LLM) — “Large Language Models (LLMs) are advanced AI systems built on deep neural networks designed to process, understand and generate human-like text.”

Starlink

• Starlink. Ho-hum. — “I made a phone call from one hand to the other, through a network of satellites moving overhead at 17,000 miles per hour. It worked exactly as expected. No drama, no delay, no sense of wonder. Just another day in the life.”

Antennas

• Stealth Ham Radio Antennas that Actually Work — “That’s the topic of this week’s video: Ham Radio in an HOA? Here’s What Works!”

08 📋Digital Radio News Digest

Executive Summary

Recent developments in amateur radio digital voice and VoIP linking modes include updates to MMDVM firmware for DMR trunking, fixes for WiRES-X 2.0 issues, and improvements to AllStarLink and EchoLink clients. The M17 mode has seen several commits to the OpenRTX firmware, including fixes for QR code generation and SKY72310 driver updates. AllStarLink is looking for beta testers for their new client, and several issues have been resolved on their forum.

Per-Mode Breakdown

DMR

The MMDVM firmware has seen updates, including small cleanups of the DMR trunking code and a merge of pull request #358 from qradiolink/trunking_patches. A Reddit user is looking for DMR devices that can do a PAN connection over Bluetooth.

D-STAR

A commit to the Pi-Star dashboard fixed an issue with empty /etc/dstar-radio.* files on first-time setup. A Reddit user shared a multi-platform DStar reflector client.

YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X

HamOperator reported problems with WiRES-X 2.0, but no other updates are available.

M17

Several commits have been made to the OpenRTX firmware, including fixes for QR code generation, SKY72310 driver updates, and improvements to the lib/qrcode module. The M17 Gateway (Go) has seen a fix for SX1255 ALSA auto-detection on Pi 3/4 with onboard audio enabled.

VoIP Linking

AllStarLink is looking for beta testers for their new client, and several issues have been resolved on their forum, including problems with connecting to new nodes, weird noise issues, and DTMF problems. The app_rpt and amp-server repositories have seen several commits, including updates to the rpt_serial and chan_usrp modules. Amateur Wire has announced experimentation with new features.

Notable Firmware or Software Updates

• MMDVM firmware: updated DMR trunking code

• OpenRTX firmware: fixes for QR code generation, SKY72310 driver updates, and improvements to the lib/qrcode module

• AllStarLink: updated app_rpt and amp-server repositories

• Pi-Star dashboard: fixed issue with empty /etc/dstar-radio.* files on first-time setup

Cross-Mode Developments

No significant cross-mode developments have been reported.

• Content generated: 2026-04-30 15:55 UTC -- 59 items collected

• Download the list of 59 items at https://etherham.com/download/179599838/?tmstv=1777564893

• To reduce the collection of stale news, I updated the Data Radio News Gatherer script by incorporating a date filter on RSS feeds

09 📡Band Conditions This Week

• Solar Flux Index (SFI): 102.0 — Moderate — reliable HF propagation

• K-Index (current): 1.0 — Quiet — excellent conditions

• K-Index (7-day max): 3.7 — Active — some HF degradation

• A-Index: 7 — Quiet (predicted)

• Sunspot Number: 85

• Active Solar Regions: 10

With a Solar Flux Index of 102 and a quiet K-index of 1, the HF bands are in good shape right now — 20, 17, and 15 meters should be offering solid DX opportunities, and 10 meters is worth a listen given the moderate solar flux and ten active regions on the sun’s face. That said, the week wasn’t entirely smooth; a 7-day max K-index of 3.7 tells us there were some unsettled stretches that likely rattled the higher bands and pushed auroral noise into the picture for a bit. If conditions were frustrating a few days ago, take heart — today looks like a fine time to get back on the air and work some DX.

• Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov)

• Generated: 2026-04-30 16:05 UTC

10 📻This Week in Radio History

Notable events from approximately April 27 through May 1, across the years.

1900 — Marconi Files the Patent That Made Tuning Possible — On April 26, 1900, Guglielmo Marconi filed his landmark British Patent No. 7,777 — known ever after as the “Four Sevens” — covering a system of tuned coupled circuits that allowed a wireless receiver to be locked onto a specific frequency. Before it, early wireless stations flooded each other with interference. After it, stations could share the spectrum without stepping on one another. Every receiver you’ve ever tuned — HF rig, repeater, handheld — traces a direct line back to the principle Marconi documented on this date.

2001 — A Civilian Heads to Orbit — On April 28, 2001, Dennis Tito launched aboard Soyuz TM-32, becoming the first private individual to travel to the International Space Station. Spaceflight depends on robust RF communication at every stage — and for amateur radio operators, the ISS would soon become a familiar voice overhead.

From the spectrum-taming patents of 1900 to the satellites overhead today, these milestones still echo in the bands we use every day.

11 QRT

Saturday’s M17 Net

Radio in my pocket

I enjoyed Saturday morning’s M17 net. This is carried every Saturday at noon Central time on America’s Kansas City Wide network. I could have participated with a Yaesu HT and hotspot, or by connecting with DroidStar, or with BlueDV and an AMBE stick. But I connected with a CS7000-M17 PLUS HT through my M17 hotspot to the M17-KCW reflector over Module A, using an accessory speaker-mic to listen in. Clipping the speaker-mic near my ear means I can easily hear transmissions clearly without disturbing my spouse. The radio in my pocket makes this highly portable. (I washed dishes during the net.)

It also leaves my hands free so I can continue to work on this newsletter while listening to the net. Jeff AE5ME does a great job with the net. I always find it informative and interesting.

Raw Notes From Saturday’s M17 Net

• LinHT rev B booted up. SX1255 chipset. Fully functional Linux computer running. Can run GNU radio package. DMR through GNU radio, for example. Main M17 Foundation project.

• Friday, October 16, ZRDC. M17 will be presented by AE5ME, sounds like.

  https://www.zeroretries.org/p/conference

• Install GNU radio on desktop or laptop, tie to SDR, way to create your own M17 station. Use SX1255 plus amplifier. This is a roll-your-own desktop station.

Sunday Logging Oops

Sunday morning, I cranked up an FT8 session on 20 meters and began making contacts. But when I glanced at my QRZ log, I didn’t see the contacts added to the log.

Scratching my head, I finally realized I had forgotten to start GridTracker. This is important because WSJT-X does not talk directly to QRZ. Instead, GridTracker acts as a bridge between WSJT-X and the QRZ log system.

Would those missing contacts be added once I started GridTracker? No. However, the contacts were logged in an .adi file by WSJT-X, and there is an easy way to bring the contacts into QRZ:

1. Locate the .adi file. Find the WSJT-X log file — usually named wsjtx_log.adi, in C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\WSJT-X.

2. Log into QRZ.com, open your QRZ log, go to your logbook settings, and use the “Import ADIF” routine to upload your wsjtx_log.adi file.

Does it work? Yep. Doing this added the three missing contacts to QRZ, catching up my log.

#################
# Import Results
#################

3 QSOs were inserted
150 duplicates were replaced
190 duplicates ignored
0 errors.
3 queued for confirmation checking

Wishing KW6U a Great PCT Journey

I was monitoring AllStar node 51018 to hear the W6EK Coffee Break Net on Sunday when I learned that Jeff KW6U is launching a border-to-border hiking adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail. Jeff has been one of the net control stations for the Coffee Break Net.

I have very fond memories of hiking in my teens and early 20s throughout the Washington Cascades and Olympics. I’ve been up (and down!) every major drainage in the Olympics, most of the time on solo hikes. Unfortunately, my knees won’t take this kind of activity now. I’ll be following Jeff’s journey from afar and sending him good wishes. Hopefully, he’ll check into some repeaters while he makes his five-month-long journey.

My Other Writing Project

I used some of my writing time this week on another writing project.I’m trying to keep up regular progress on this. The easiest thing would be to set it aside and think to myself: I need to ponder this a bit more. Instead, I’m trying to just write and then come back to it later for editing. So far, that’s working.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

It’s Monday, and I’m just getting started on the Random Wire newsletter. Usually, I’m about 80% done with the first draft by Monday morning. Not so this week. I took some time this weekend for family instead of radio and that significantly reduced my Random Wire writing time. Then the week started with back-to-back meetings, leaving me with little energy to work on radio.

But without work, there would be less money for radio, so this is a tradeoff I’m willing to make. With that out of the way, let’s talk radio.

Announcing…ROTA-Radio

I’ve been waiting awhile to bring this to your attention. I hope it will bring a smile to your face (as it does to mine), and perhaps you’ll enjoy what Paul N4FTD shares. I do.

In Why ROTA? — Innovation Born of Necessity, Paul opens with his why:

In the amateur radio world, we talk a lot about “portable” or “mobile” operations. Usually, that implies a mountain top or a remote forest. But for me, the most important mobile operation happens within the 1/2-mile radius of my home in Southwest Florida.

ROTA (Recliners on the Air) is the realization that being a dedicated husband and caregiver doesn’t have to mean being “Off the Air.” It is a philosophy of balance—staying connected to the world while staying exactly where life needs me to be.

Caregiving for a spouse is where Paul and I bonded. I’m living that life, too, so I relate well to the challenges of balancing caregiving with being active on the air.

The other topic we connected on was remote operation of the Icom IC-7300. Turns out he’s already cracked that nut. See Recliners on the Air: Operating the Icom IC-7300 Over WiFi using SDR-Control and RS-BA1 for how he operates his IC-7300 from his recliner, while the radio happily runs out in the shack.

ROTA-Radio. Something many of us can relate to, or even something we do, but never described with a label. I hope you’ll get to know Paul and enjoy what he shares with us. At this stage of his radio blogging journey, he can use helpful feedback. Find ROTA-radio on WordPress.com at https://rotaradio.wordpress.com/.

Recreational: Listening to Classical Music and the ISS

Those two things don’t normally go together.

As I write this, I’m listening to a classical FM radio station located about 49 miles away “as the crow flies” and simultaneously listening to communications with the International Space Station. The ISS stream is available on AllStar node 516221. I note that not many hams are listening in at the moment:

What does it sound like? This one-minute audio capture shows even proficient radio operators occasionally double on their transmissions! This is node 516221 to my node 588418, retransmitted over RF to my BTECH UV-Pro handheld:

By the way, the BTECH UV-PRO has been a very solid radio for me and is one of just a few radios I always keep charged and readily available. I reported on it back in July 2025 in Random Wire 139. It remains available and is well-reviewed:

BTECH UV-PRO (TAN) IP67 Dual Band VHF/UHF Two-Way Radio | Bluetooth, GPS, APRS, USB-C, NOAA Alerts, Aviation RX, App Text Messaging (affiliate link)

The ISS is passing directly overhead as I type this, as shown on my HamClock OHB (Open Hamclock Backend):

There are other ways to listen, including with your handheld transceiver and online.

On EtherHam

• A reader asked for the Digital Radio News Gatherer script and a how-to guide. These are now provided in a single ZIP file available at the end of TechNote 15 — Upgrading the Digital Radio News Gatherer with Groq AI.

• New this week: TinySA Ultra vs. NanoVNA-H4: Different Tools, Better Together. I now have both units in hand. I’ll have more information on them next week. The EtherHam article reviews the use cases of the two devices.

Update on HF Watch

I really don’t know how useful this is, but I find it interesting, and it was a blast to build it. HF Watch has been running around the clock for 11 days. In that time, it has collected nearly five million data points! If you missed this last week, HF Watch runs on a Raspberry Pi 5.

This one-week average view clearly shows 20 meters is the most popular band in my grid square, followed by 40 meters. Activity on 20 meters kicks up in the morning hours, then picks up even more in the afternoon. The pattern for 40 meters is more subtle, showing some increase in the late evening (presumably as 20 meters fades out).

Is this surprising? Not at all, and that’s why I say I don’t know how useful it is. I was not surprised to see little activity on 6 meters and 10 meters. I did think I’d see more on 15 meters as that has been a very solid band for me.

Next Week

Next week I’ll have some hands-on reporting on the TinySA Ultra and NanoVNA-H4.

I’ll also share thoughts on one of the latest AllScan devices, the UCI80M (find this about 1/3 of the way down this page). This tiny device uses a Motorola M-1 speaker-mic. After only a few days of operating with the UCI80M, I already know it’s going to be one of my favorite AllStar node devices.

01 — M17 over RF with Your Phone and HT: Is This Viable?

An idea popped into my mind recently and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Many of us who use M17 are doing it over the internet using DroidStar or the MSeven iPad app. Connect, key up, talk. It’s easy and it works great. But what if you could do genuine M17 digital voice over RF, with your Android phone as the control head, using a radio you might already have sitting in the shack?

This is not a hypothetical. It’s a thing that exists right now.

The key pieces are: Mobilinkd's m17-kiss-ht Android app and their TNC4. If you've been in the APRS or packet world for any length of time, you know about Mobilinkd. They pioneered the modern Bluetooth TNC, a little matchbox-sized device that connects your radio to your phone wirelessly for packet operations. The TNC4 is their current model, and they've added M17's 4FSK modulation to its bag of tricks. The m17-kiss-ht app handles the Codec 2 voice encoding and M17 protocol on the phone side. With the app and the TNC, your Android phone becomes the PTT and voice processor, the TNC4 becomes the modem, and your radio becomes the transmitter.

That makes this real M17 digital voice, over the air, with no dedicated M17 radio required.

But there's a catch. M17 is picky about radio audio in a way that APRS simply isn't. You need flat, unfiltered audio plus very fast key-up. That rules out most budget HTs and many (most?) modern radios whose audio is tuned for voice, not data.

The M17 Foundation has a radio compatibility list and it's genuinely useful, but it's heavily weighted toward mobile radios and older commercial gear: Kenwood and Yaesu mobiles, some ICOM, and some Motorola commercial units. What's almost entirely missing is modern, data-capable handheld transceivers. And there are some obvious candidates that seem like they should work but simply haven't been publicly tested and written up.

The one confirmed HT success story involves the Quansheng UV-K5/K6, but that requires a hardware modification: capacitor swaps to extend the audio frequency response, plus custom firmware to get keying latency down to acceptable levels. The interesting question is whether a radio with a purpose-built 9600-baud data path might work without any modification at all.

Quansheng UV-K6 UV-K5(8) Walkie Talkie 5W Airband Radio Type C Charge UHF VHF DTMF FM Two Way Radio with NOAA Weather Alarm Function (affiliate link)

Take the Kenwood TH-D74A with a built-in 9600-baud TNC and a well-documented flat audio data port that many operators rely on for APRS and packet data. Does its audio path satisfy M17's stricter requirements? My guess: yes, because it's probably the same Kenwood data port architecture used in the TM-V71A and TM-D710 mobiles that are already confirmed on the compatibility list. Is the key-up fast enough when driven from an external TNC? Nobody appears to have tried it and reported back in any systematic way.

That's the opportunity here. If it works, this is M17 digital voice accessible to anyone with a capable HT, a TNC4, and an Android phone — no purpose-built M17 radio required. The app is developer-grade rather than ready for everyday use, the Bluetooth pairing on Android has some rough edges, and setup takes patience. The developer is candid that it's early-stage. But the concept is solid, the TNC4 is proven hardware, and the code is open source. What's missing is operators willing to put radios on the test bench and share what they find.

If you've got a 9600-baud capable radio — especially an HT with data port access — and a TNC4, you may be closer to an experimental M17 RF platform than you realize. Someone ought to try this.

Resources

• m17-kiss-ht source code: https://github.com/mobilinkd/m17-kiss-ht

• M17 Foundation radio compatibility list: M17 Foundation Wiki

• Mobilinkd TNC4: mobilinkd.com

02 — Gear: TinySA Ultra Spectrum Analyzer

I bought a TinySA Ultra spectrum analyzer from Radioddity. I’m happy with it, though I’m still figuring out the basics. What is detailed below draws more on specifications and reviews rather than deep personal experience. I’m still learning how to use this device.

If you don’t know what a spectrum analyzer does, you may want to start with my comparison of the TinySA Ultra spectrum analyzer and the NanoVNA-H4 vector network analyzer. Find this on EtherHam.com at: TinySA Ultra vs. NanoVNA-H4: Different Tools, Better Together

My RigExpert Stick 500 antenna analyzer is a wonderful piece of kit, but I wanted to make sure I was getting the full picture, so I added tiny spectrum analyzer to my bag of tools. The one I selected was from Radioddity:

TinySA Ultra Spectrum Analyzer | Antenna Analyzer | 100kHz-5.3GHz | PC Connectivity | 4.0” Touchscreen | 3000mAh Battery

(If you’re interested, there should be a 10% off coupon available, but I’ve also seen a 15% off promotion.)

This isn’t the cheapest version of this type of device, but two things sold me on spending a little bit more: my good history with Radioddity, and excellent reviews on their website for this device. I also appreciate the enclosure. Instead of a thin metal case with sharp edges and corners, the TinySA comes in a comfortable-to-hold plastic case. This unit also has some heft to it — more than I’ve felt with cheaper units — which inspires more confidence that this is a high-quality device.

The only thing it lacks is SMA-to-SO239 adapters for my antennas, but I have a couple of those so it’s not a big deal. I do worry, though, about my inexpensive adapters. It would be worth getting higher-quality adapters that won’t taint the readings on the analyzer.

The TinySA is subject to damage if overloaded, so I purchased a few attenuators to help protect the device:

AURSINC SMA Attenuator Kit, 10dB/20dB/30dB 3-Pack, SMA Male to Female RF Attenuator 2W 50 Ohm DC-6GHz in-Line Attenuators with Highly Linear Attenuation (affiliate link)

(You need really good light to see the 10dB, 20dB, and 30dB markings on these little things! The etched markings blend with the attenuator body.)

I also purchased a couple of adapters that should take some pressure off those small SMA connectors:

DHT Electronics Handheld Antenna Cable SMA Male to UHF SO-239 Female Connectors 6’‘ Pack of 2 for Amplifier (affiliate link)

TinySA Ultra: What It Actually Does (and Doesn’t)

The Radioddity TinySA Ultra is one of those rare tools that punches above its weight—small enough to toss in a go-kit, but capable enough to answer real RF questions when you’re away from the bench. It’s not a lab-grade instrument and it doesn’t pretend to be. But used within its limits, it’s remarkably useful.

Core Performance

Frequency Coverage (Two Personalities)

The TinySA Ultra is really two analyzers sharing a box:

• Low range: ~100 kHz to 800 MHz
  This is where it performs best — cleaner response, better dynamic range, more trustworthy measurements.

• High range (“Ultra mode”): ~800 MHz to ~5.3 GHz
  Coverage is impressive for the size, but performance drops off — more spurs, less accuracy, and more interpretation required.

Resolution Bandwidth (RBW)

• Down to ~200 Hz in the low range, which is genuinely useful for narrowband work

• Wider (and less precise) in Ultra mode

This is one of the quiet strengths of the Ultra—it can zoom in more than you might expect.

Input Limits (Read This Twice)

• Absolute maximum: +10 dBm

• In practice, keep signals well below 0 dBm

This device does not have a forgiving frontend. A hot signal straight off a transmitter will ruin your day…and your analyzer. A simple attenuator is cheap insurance.

Amplitude Accuracy

• Typically ±2 dB, assuming a decent calibration baseline

Good enough for field work, comparisons, and troubleshooting, but not for certification.

Hardware & Interface

Display & Controls

• 4.0-inch touchscreen, 320 × 240

• Functional, not fancy, but perfectly usable in the field

Power

• ~3000 mAh internal battery

• USB-C charging

• Long enough runtime for real work, not just demos

RF Connections

• Two SMA inputs:

  • Low range input

  • High range input

• Separate SMA output for signal generation

• Built-in 30 MHz reference output (CAL)

It’s a simple layout, but it keeps you honest about which range you’re using.

Signal Generation (Useful, with Caveats)

The Ultra can act as a basic signal source, which is handy, but this is not a substitute for a dedicated signal generator.

• Sine output: ~100 kHz to 800 MHz (clean and usable)

• Higher-frequency output: extends into GHz range, but expect more harmonics and less purity

• “Square wave” claims: take this with a grain of salt as the output is synthesized RF, not a true logic-level square wave

Where it does shine is as a tracking generator for:

• Filter tuning

• Passband visualization

• Quick-and-dirty characterization work

Calibration Reference

• Built-in temperature-stabilized 30 MHz oscillator

• Useful for:

  • Self-checks

  • Sanity-checking frequency accuracy

  • Feeding external gear in a pinch

Practical Reality Check

Fragility (Electrical, Not Mechanical)

The Ultra’s biggest weakness isn’t build quality—it’s overdrive sensitivity. Stay within limits and it’ll serve you well. Ignore them once, and you may be shopping for a replacement.

Portability (Where It Wins)

This is where the TinySA Ultra earns its keep:

• Field diagnostics

• Antenna and filter work

• Hunting interference sources

• Bench overflow when the “real” analyzer is tied up

It’s not a replacement for a full-size spectrum analyzer, but it’s often the tool you actually have with you that matters more than specs.

Bottom Line

The TinySA Ultra lives in that sweet spot between toy and tool.

Use the low range when you can, treat the high range as advisory, respect the input limits, and it will give you answers that would have required far more expensive gear not so long ago.

If you expect lab-grade precision, my guess is you’ll be disappointed. If you use it like a smart field instrument, you’ll probably wonder how you managed without it.

03 — SDR: NESDR Nano 2 Plus

I have a bit more to report about my tiny SDR dongle, the NESDR Nano 2 Plus.

NESDR Nano 2 Plus - Tiny Black RTL-SDR USB Set (RTL2832U & R820T2) with Ultra-Low Phase Noise 0.5PPM TCXO, MCX Antenna (affiliate link)

First, the price on Amazon has bumped up from $38.95 to $41.95. I don’t often see prices for these devices change so this caught me by surprise. I still see this as a great value.

Second, it runs warm. The cooling fins on top of my fanless PC are running 95-101°F and the NESDR Nano is just a hair under 101°F. That’s warmer than I’m used to feeling when I pluck a USB device out of a computer.

Third, the MCX antenna port surprised me…but only because I’m not very familiar with this configuration. First time around, I ordered the wrong adapter to connect it to my FM dipole antenna. What I needed was an MCX male end to go into the NESDR:

For my antenna wire, the other end of the adapter needed to be an SMA female connector. That’s what worked for me.

Once I connected the FM dipole with telescoping antennas to the NESDR, the signal strength jumped dramatically. In fact, I had to go into the SDR++ (pronounced “SDR Plus Plus”) app and reduce the gain. I now receive more stations, more clearly.

This was a simple thing. What improved the SDR for recreational listening was connecting it to a better FM antenna with an MCX Male to SMA Female adapter. To get the right adapter, I purchased a kit (because one can never have too many adapters):

TUOLNK SMA to MCX Connectors Kit Coaxial Adapter Male to Female for WiFi Antenna/Networks/WiFi Router/Coaxial Cable Gold-Plated MCX to SMA Coax Adapter Kit 4pcs (affiliate link)

It is working well. I’m listening to KING-FM Classical on my laptop located about 35 feet away from the NESDR. The NESDR device is feeding the signal over my home network and the SDR++ app on my laptop is getting that stream wirelessly from the network. Below is a two-minute capture of the audio stream.

The 66,000-watt KING-FM transmitter is located on Tiger Mountain, about 80 miles distant by road, or 49 miles “as the crow flies.”

I also bought some additional small antennas to help me explore other bands the SDR can access.

RaTLSnake M6 v2 - Premium 3-Antenna Bundle for NESDR, RTL-SDR, HackRF, and Other Software Defined Radios. Magnetic Whip Antenna Set Made with Low-Loss RG58 Cable for Radios with 50 Ohm SMA Connectors (affiliate link)

I already have this bundle at my Oregon QTH where I use the telescoping aerial antenna for capturing air band traffic. It connects directly to the RTL-SDR I use for this purpose.

04 — AI: Lumo Is Proton’s Privacy-First Alternative to ChatGPT and Other AI Chatbots

The company behind Proton VPN, Proton Mail and Proton Pass, has released an open-source AI chatbot that it says isn't trained on user data.

This is interesting: a ChatGPT-like AI from a privacy-focused company (Proton). Since I have a paid Proton account, this showed up in my Proton dashboard:

I’ve been testing Lumo with technical questions related to amateur radio. The results seem about on par with ChatGPT…maybe a little thinner on detail and background, but still pretty good.

If it’s close to what ChatGPT can do, what’s the point? Privacy. Lumo keeps conversations fully private with end-to-end encryption and no server logs. Nothing is stored or used for training, and even Proton can’t access your saved chats.

There is a free tier (see I Tried Proton’s Lumo AI, a Private Alternative to ChatGPT).

I believe that even though I’m a paid Proton user, I’m actually using Lumo’s free tier. There is a Lumo Plus option for $12.99/month but I have not signed up for that level of service, since I already subscribe to ChatGPT and Claude.

The one aspect you may not like about using the Lumo free plan is you have to create a Proton account. It’s free to create that account, just be sure to keep a record of how to log in. Why? Because Proton doesn’t keep a record of your authentication details so they can’t recover it for you.

05 — Proton Meet Introduced: Is It Right for You?

And speaking of privacy, if you are at all interested in meeting privacy, Proton Meet will be interesting.

Proton Meet Introduced

Proton introduced Proton Meet on April Fool’s Day — an odd choice. (Well, it was actually launched on March 31st, but I didn’t see it until April 1st. It felt like they might be fooling with us.) It was hard for me to take it seriously until some time had passed and I could see it was real.

Proton quietly launched Proton Meet on March 31, 2026, making it immediately available on web browsers, iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. Unlike a limited beta, this was a full public release.

Do You Need a Proton Account?

No, and this is one of its most notable features. Anyone with a free Proton account can host calls with up to 50 participants for up to one hour. But if you don’t have an account, you can still host or join a call instantly with up to four people with no sign-up required. Zoom requires an account to host; Google Meet requires a Google account; Microsoft Teams needs a Microsoft account. Proton Meet needs nothing.

Limitations by Tier:

• No account (anonymous): Up to four participants, no sign-up required.

• Free Proton account: Up to 50 participants, calls limited to one hour.

• Meet Professional ($7.99/user/month): Unlimited meetings per day, calls up to 24 hours long, up to 100 participants, screen sharing, and meeting scheduling.

• Proton Workspace Premium ($20/month annually): Up to 250 participants.

How Does the Security Work?

Proton Meet uses Messaging Layer Security (MLS), an open-source end-to-end encryption protocol designed for real-time group communication that has been independently reviewed. All media and chats are encrypted on the client side, meaning Proton cannot access or process any unencrypted data from calls. MLS creates a cryptographic group with a shared epoch key that changes each time a participant joins or leaves, meaning new members cannot read previous messages, and those who have left cannot access future messages.

One Security Caveat Worth Noting

The main point of vulnerability is the meeting link itself. If the link is shared with someone who shouldn’t have it, that person could join the call. Proton suggests addressing this by locking the meeting once all expected participants are present, removing any unrecognized attendees, or rotating the link.

The Bigger Picture

Meet is the final piece of a puzzle Proton has been assembling for years. The company already offered encrypted email, calendar, cloud storage, collaborative documents, spreadsheets, a password manager, and a VPN. With Meet in the lineup, Proton Workspace now covers essentially everything Google Workspace does, except every layer is end-to-end encrypted. Being based in Switzerland should also keep it outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act, which is relevant for organizations with GDPR compliance concerns.

The Proton suite of services is not as polished as you’ll get with Google or Microsoft, but what you do get that other vendors can’t provide is a clear focus on your privacy.

06 — Website Drama

Bad Plugins

Sometimes a bit of software acquires some undesirable pieces, it gets pushed out as new installs and updates, and suddenly a new attack is taking place.

Such was the case with a bunch of plugins that were purchased and then infected. EtherHam.com had one of those plugins but I caught it very quickly and deleted it. I’ve scanned my files and the site is clean. I also had my web host do a deep, top-to-bottom scan, and that also came up clean.

Here’s the story: Someone Bought 30 WordPress Plugins and Planted a Backdoor in All of Them.

I have backups of the EtherHam site but did not need them. I monitor various WordPress-related sites for exactly this kind of information, so that I can respond swiftly and appropriately.

CDN Experiment Failed

I’m going to count my experiment for the past several months with a content delivery network (CDN) as a failure. I had hoped the CDN would offload some volume of content from the web host to the CDN servers spread around the world. It did exactly that for quite a while. No complaints.

Something changed, though, in the past couple of weeks. I suspect my web host blocked some of those servers. The hosting company does, after all, provide its own CDN system — for an additional fee. I was feeling pretty happy with Bunny.net’s CDN until requests for EtherHam web content failed to reach Bunny’s CDN servers.

I asked my web host to whitelist the Bunny CDN addresses. “Sorry, we can’t do that unless you upgrade your hosting account.” Wrong answer.

I’ve disabled Bunny and the site performance has smoothed out. I want to emphasize this was not a problem created by Bunny.net. I’ve been impressed with the quality of services they provide at very affordable prices.

07 — The Short Stack

Radio

• Pebble HF coming “early this summer” — I received this in an email a few days ago: “When will it be available? We are still planning on releasing the Pebble HF in ‘early summer’. We know that isn’t very specific, and we will give more specific details as we get closer.” You can get on the notification list by filling out the form at the bottom of the Pebble HF homepage.

DX

• DX Cluster - POTA, SOTA, DXpéditions, RBN, DXSpider — “Real-time amateur radio DX cluster — HF spots all bands, mode filters, DX expeditions, POTA, LoTW/eQSL integration. DXSpider node F1LED-2.”

Digital

• Pat Winlink client version 1.0.0 released — “Pat is a cross platform Winlink client written in Go. It runs on any modern operating system, including Linux, macOS and Windows. Pat provides both a modern GUI and a powerful command-line interface. Pat supports Winlink templates/forms and is open source and free.” See the project on GitHub and get versions from their GetPat website. (I gave Pat a try and think it has promise. It’s pretty spare right now, and you have to start it from the terminal which will put some people off.)

• Reviving Teletext for Ham Radio — “Hack the airwaves with some of the best tech of the 1980s.” The author vibe-coded an app to use teletext over RF.

SDR

• Scan the Invisible: RTL-SDR Wideband Signal Scanner — “Transform your RTL SDR dongle into a professional grade spectrum scanner that automatically detects, classifies, and tracks radio signal[s].”

Antenna

• OPEK OP-CTP2405 5 Section 24 ft Telescoping Carbon Fiber Mast available from HRO, but be aware that freight charges apply. If you’re near the Anaheim or Milwaukee store, they are in stock.

Remote Control

• Advantages to having radio control software — “Most controls you may need are just a mouse click away. There is no diving into radio menus to find something. Easy tuning with a mouse wheel, and the list goes on.”

Meshtastic

• Meshtastic vs Meshcore: Which One Should You Pick? — “If your goal is a broad, beginner-friendly, highly established off-grid messaging ecosystem, Meshtastic is usually the easier starting point. If you want a platform that leans heavily into a more security-focused, decentralised approach with a growing ecosystem and different workflow preferences, MeshCore may be the better fit.”

• Meshcore.io - Why The Split? — This is very fresh news about some drama in the Meshcore realm: “Since the internal split, we launched the meshcore.io site, as Andy controls the meshcore.co.uk site and original discord server. We’ve been left with little other recourse. And, since launching the site, Andy copied the look and feel (again, using Claude) even though we asked him not to.” I’m certain we have not heard the last about this.

LoRA

• Smart Forest & Water Quality Monitoring System Using LoRaWAN — Of great interest to me because of my natural resources conservation work out in the real world.

Recreational Listening

• How to Find and Add/Repair Missing Streams on Skytune Radios — This article caught my eye because the Ocean Digital WR-390 internet radio I use in my spouse’s room uses Skytune. The WR-390 model is no longer available on Amazon, but a smaller version is, and it looks just as good to me at $79.99: Ocean Digital WR-336M Wi-Fi Internet FM Radio, Bluetooth Speaker, Podcast, 2.4” Color Display, USB Playback, Dual Alarm Clock, Sleep Timer, Dimmer, Black (affiliate link)

08 —📋Digital Radio Digest

The weekly Digital Radio News Digest run found little of interest to report about DMR and D-STAR. I look at sources for news about DMR, D-STAR, YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X, M17, and VoIP Linking.

• WiRES-X: YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X has seen updates to WiRES-X 2.0, with discussions on what users should do with the update. Customizing options for WiRES-X are also available. Additionally, there are resources on solving WiRES-X ISP connection problems.

• M17: The M17 C++ library has been updated to match libm17 1.1.8, and the M17 spec has seen changes to descriptive words in Appendix A. The M17 tools have been updated to handle exceptions arising from invalid options and to fix Windows build issues.

• VoIP: VoIP Linking systems, such as AllStarLink, have experienced issues with connections and audio quality. Users have reported problems connecting to EchoLink nodes and Hamvoip nodes, and there have been issues with poor audio quality since the ASL3 update. The Trixie Appliance installation has also failed for some users.

You can get the raw information sources used for this report from EtherHam.com as a .txt file. Fair warning: there are 154 individual items listed!

09 —📡 Band Conditions This Week

• Solar Flux Index (SFI): 122.0 — Good — solid conditions on 10m through 20m

• K-Index (current): 1.0 — Quiet — excellent conditions

• K-Index (7-day max): 5.7 — Storm conditions — significant HF disruption

• A-Index: 9 — Unsettled (predicted)

• Sunspot Number: 85

• Active Solar Regions: 4

With an SFI of 122 and the K-index sitting at a calm 1, the higher bands are in good shape right now — 10, 15, and 20 meters should all be offering solid openings, and DX chasers will want to take advantage while conditions are cooperative. That said, it’s worth knowing this week wasn’t entirely smooth sailing; a max K-index of 5.7 means the ionosphere took a few punches from geomagnetic storming at some point in the past seven days, and with the predicted A-index still at 9, we’re not completely out of the woods yet. Enjoy the quiet window while it lasts, keep an eye on the forecasts, and don’t be surprised if conditions get a little bumpy again before the week is out.

Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov). Generated: 2026-04-23 15:29 UTC (8:29 AM PDT Pacific Daylight Time, UTC−7).

10 — 📻 This Week in Radio History

April 20, 1920 — After World War I shut amateurs down, the bands began to come back to life in early 1920 as restrictions were lifted. By April, U.S. operators were getting back on the air, and experimentation picked up almost immediately. This was the era when spark began giving way to continuous wave (CW), and when a re-energized community started pushing the boundaries again, laying the groundwork for the more organized, international amateur radio movement that would follow.

April 21 17, 1970 — The crew of Apollo 13 made it home after a mission that went very wrong, very quickly. For anyone paying attention, it was a masterclass in problem-solving under pressure, with communication systems playing a central role. It’s a reminder that when things fall apart, the ability to adapt, improvise, and stay connected isn’t just useful: it’s everything. (The April 21 date came from ChatGPT; Claude caught the error.)

April 23, 1965 — Intelsat I (“Early Bird”) became the first commercial satellite in geostationary orbit. Suddenly, the idea of continuous, real-time global communication wasn’t theoretical anymore. For amateur radio, this was an early glimpse of a future that would eventually include OSCAR satellites and routine space-based contacts. “Worldwide” was starting to mean exactly that.

April 24, 1978 — The first NAVSTAR satellite went up, kicking off what would become the Global Positioning System. This system was not built for hams but was quickly adopted by them. Today, GPS quietly underpins a lot of what we do, from precise timing for digital modes like FT8 to APRS position reporting and satellite work. It’s one of those technologies that slipped into the background while becoming absolutely essential.

11 — QRT

Substack

There are a couple of features I like about Substack.

The first is being able to listen to someone’s text-only publication while I drive. The Substack app has a text-to-speech service built in and I use it frequently. Yes, it is a bit mechanical sounding but it works surprisingly well, allowing me to consume great content while I’m behind the wheel.

Second, the new Substack template capabilities are proving to be convenient. Instead of opening a previous issue and copying bits of the formatting pieces I want for the new issue, I can get them from saved templates. The signature block? It’s now a template. The orange divider? Template. The overall structure? Template. If you are a writer, having an easy way to craft a consistent newsletter is a boon because it means you can focus on your writing instead of getting distracted by formatting.

Next Week

For next week, I’ll have a report on the AllScan UCI80M, a tiny device that uses a Motorola M-1 speaker-microphone. Right out of the box, I was impressed by the simplicity of the device, the small size, and the great sound quality. I have it running on a Raspberry Pi 4. Because of the good audio, this is destined to become one of my favorite pieces of AllStar gear.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

It’s been another interesting week of working with Python and Claude. There’s a long piece on this at EtherHam.com titled Coding with Claude that describes two apps: the Lab Tracker and HF Watch. The Lab Tracker is a simple interface to keep track of the different machines on my network. HF Watch looks at amateur radio usage by band and time of day. Visit Coding with Claude: Lab Tracker and HF Watch for more.

Also new at EtherHam this week:

• TechNote 15 — Upgrading the Digital Radio News Gatherer with Groq AI

• TechNote 16 — A Practical Backup System for Vibe-Coded Projects on the Raspberry Pi 5

My CDN (content delivery network) has been having some trouble this week. A few EtherHam visitors have let me know that images were missing. The service provider is trying something to see if it will help with this, so if you have a moment, please jump over to EtherHam.com, browse a few articles, then let me know if images are missing or not loaded. Thank you.

PoC radios (push-to-talk over cellular) for amateurs will be the focus of the weekly Let’s Talk Digital net on America’s Kansas City Wide network next week. That will be Thursday evening, April 23, at 8 pm Central (6 pm Pacific). If you’re curious about PoC radios for hams, the Thursday net promises to be incredibly informative.

I did get a few evenings on the HF bands. Wednesday, I made a trip to Portland and drove through five little storm cells where the temperature dropped quickly and snow started sticking to the pavement and windshield. Translation: it’s a fairly normal spring in the Pacific Northwest — warm and sunny, cold and stormy, rinse and repeat.

01 WSJT-X 3.0 Upgrade Is Significant

Last week, a significant upgrade to WSJT-X was released.

Here’s a rundown of what changed from WSJT-X 2.x to 3.0, released April 8, 2026. (Find WSJT-X on SourceForge.) When you upgrade, it’s good practice to back up your WSJT-X.ini and log — your settings should migrate (mine did), but better safe than sorry.

The first thing you’ll notice is the user interface is crisper, more modern:

Also notice the blue-color box in the lower left corner that says “Receiving, Filters On.” More on filters in a moment.

What WSJT-X 3.0 is, architecturally

The jump from 2.7.0 to 3.0 reflects a genuine architectural step forward, consolidating features that had been circulating in the unofficial “Improved” branch and adding new ones that go well beyond cosmetic changes. If you were already running WSJT-X Improved by DG2YCB, much of this will look familiar. According to the WSJT-X 3.0 User Guide, the feature sets of WSJT-X and WSJT-X Improved have been merged, bringing the two programs into alignment.

Key Changes

Parallel FT8 Decoding — FT8 decoding now runs up to a dozen concurrent threads. On a modern multi-core machine, the practical effect is a faster and more complete decode list at the end of each 15-second period — particularly useful on busy DX frequencies where marginal signals compete for decode slots.

Full Duplex Operation — WSJT-X can now transmit and receive simultaneously, opening a legitimate path for satellite work where the audio source is the transponder downlink, and for monitoring your own transmitted signal via a WebSDR as the audio input. Until now, this required external workarounds or separate software.

Advanced Filtering System — The new filter system lets you suppress, highlight, or hide stations already worked on the current band, worked today, or worked yesterday — all configurable from File | Settings | Filters. The Filters menu lets you toggle categories on the fly during a session. For example, if you only want to see CQ calls from POTA stations, there’s a filter for that.

Smart Sequencing for All Modes — Wait and Reply, Wait and Call, and Wait and Pounce — previously available only in FT8 — now apply to all WSJT-X QSO modes, including JT4, JT9, JT65, FST4, FT4, MSK144, and Q65.

SWR/Power Monitoring and TX Protection — Transmission can be stopped automatically if reported SWR exceeds a configurable threshold (e.g., 2.5), depending on rig support via Hamlib or FLRig. Transmit power is displayed in real-time and works with most modern rigs.

EME Enhancements — EME operators get quick-access buttons for Echo mode and six popular Q65 sub-modes, easier dial frequency selection within EME sub-bands, and experimental decoding of sub-modes 15A, 15B, and 15C with EME delay.

Single-Click Band Buttons — Single-click band buttons can be enabled from the View menu for faster band switching.

Audible Alerts — Customizable sound alerts for specific message content are now built in.

TCI Support — Enhanced rig control and audio routing via the Transceiver Control Interface (TCI) is now included.

SuperFox / SuperHound Improvements — SuperHound operators can now activate Wait and Call for SuperFox callsigns, with warnings for frequency conflicts.

Advantages for the Modern Ham

For a DXer, the parallel decoding and advanced filters are the big wins — you’ll pull more call signs out of a pileup and spend less time visually parsing signals you’ve already worked. For satellite ops, full duplex is transformative, eliminating the need for separate software or audio routing workarounds. The SWR halt is a great safety feature if you run barefoot or switch antennas mid-session. And the unification of the Improved branch means you no longer need to choose between the official version and the community fork — you get the best of both in a stable, supported release.

02 Notable: Jim N1ADJ’s M17 Go Tools Project

A quietly ambitious project has been taking shape on GitHub. Jim N1ADJ’s M17 Go tools repository (github.com/jancona/m17) started as a messaging experiment and has grown into a multi-tool platform that hints at where M17 data communications could be headed.

I’m talking about m17-bridge, an experimental network service that bridges M17 SMS messages to and from Discord, IRC, and APRS-IS. It connects to hotspots and repeaters using the standard M17 internet protocol — meaning it looks just like a reflector to any compatible device. The clever part is how it uses M17’s familiar module letter system as a routing mechanism: instead of selecting Module A to reach one group of users and Module B to reach another, you’re selecting which external messaging platform your SMS traffic crosses into. Module A might bridge to a Discord channel, Module B to an IRC server, Module C to APRS-IS. From the radio operator’s perspective, it’s the same connect-and-talk experience you already know — but the destination is now a messaging platform that non-ham users access. When a GNSS-equipped radio sends position data, the bridge automatically forwards periodic position reports to APRS-IS as well.

Alongside the bridge, the project includes m17-gateway, which supports three hardware platforms (CC1200 Pi HAT, SX1255 Pi HAT, and MMDVM-compatible modems) and can function as either a hotspot or a full M17 repeater. It ships with full M17 feature support including voice, SMS, and GNSS position mapping. A companion GUI messaging client — cross-platform, built on the Fyne framework — rounds out the toolkit and suggests Jim has everyday usability in mind, not just developer experimentation.

What’s worth watching here is the project’s trajectory. M17’s packet mode has largely been underutilized — most operators think of M17 as a voice mode. This project is a serious attempt to change that, and the APRS integration in particular could give M17 text messaging a reach far beyond the M17 community itself. If m17-bridge matures and a public example node comes online as planned, it could become a model for how open digital radio modes integrate with the broader internet messaging ecosystem.

It is early days — but this project is worth keeping an eye on.

03 M17 Data Modes: The Sleeping Giant Wakes

Most M17 operators think of the protocol as a voice mode — and understandably so, since that’s where almost all the activity has been since 2019. But M17 was designed from the start to be a data protocol, too, and 2025-2026 is shaping up as the period when that side of the protocol gets some serious attention.

The spec’s reserved packet mode types tell the story: RAW, AX.25, APRS, 6LoWPAN, IPv4, SMS, and Winlink are all defined. What’s been missing isn’t the protocol foundation — it’s the tools, the experiments, and the community focus. That’s beginning to change.

The most concrete sign of progress is Jim N1ADJ’s m17-bridge, covered above. Bridging M17 SMS traffic to Discord, IRC, and APRS-IS is a real data mode application, running on real hardware, today. It’s a preview of what becomes possible when developers start giving M17’s packet mode the attention it deserves.

Further out, the IPv4 story is intriguing but still unfinished. M17 has native IP framing built into the spec and a protocol identifier for IPv4, but how to actually implement IP over M17 seems underspecified, making this is open territory for an ambitious developer. Meanwhile, the Open Research Institute selected M17 as the uplink protocol for their P4DX satellite transponder project, a serious technical endorsement that points toward M17 data modes eventually operating in space as well as on the ground.

None of this would be moving forward as confidently without a significant inflection point from mid-2025. In July of that year, the MMDVM project dropped M17 support, a decision that quickly affected Pi-Star and WPSD — the hotspot software platforms that tens of thousands of operators use. For M17 users running MMDVM-equipped hotspots, it looked like the rug had been pulled.

The M17 Foundation's response was immediate: fork the last WPSD codebase that still included M17 support and make it available to the community. WPSD-M17 is that fork — not actively developed, but preserved and functional, giving operators running MMDVM hotspots time to absorb the change without losing access to M17 overnight. More importantly, it bought the broader community breathing room to figure out what comes next. The answer, increasingly, is native M17 hardware and software that doesn't depend on MMDVM at all, as well as increasing support for MMDVM hardware.

In hindsight, what looked like a setback in July 2025 turns out to have been a catalyst. The M17 Project is building for independence and the data mode story is a big part of what that independence will enable.

I asked Steve Stroh N8GNJ of Zero Retries to look this piece over and he suggested these valuable additions which I am including verbatim below:

• Potentially, M17 has the best support for “file transfer” data of any of the Amateur Radio DV modes.

  • DMR has support for data, but it’s not specified with enough detail to enforce or incentivize data compatibility. The data implementation by Motorola and Hytera, for example, are usable, but only within those radio families - the Hytera data app cannot send data to a Motorola DMR radio, and vice versa.

  • P25 has very similar “support” for data as DMR.

  • D-Star supports data, but only as a stream with no packet framing. In addition, late in the life of D-Star, Icom supported DV Fast Data which allows the 3600 bps digital voice payload to also be used for data, but it’s supported only on the most recent D-Star radios.

  • System Fusion only supports data for transferring images; use for any other type of data transfer is blocked.

• Support for short messaging and position data and “APRS-like” short data vary widely in DMR, P25, D-Star, and SF.

• Because M17 didn’t have a profit motive guiding its development (soak the customer when they want to use data on their very expensive digital voice radios), they embraced and adapted the well-proven data technology of packet radio.

• M17 may well be the first “digital agnostic” (digital voice / messaging / position / block data) DEFAULT mode to be implemented in the new generation of Software Defined Radios that will debut with the LinHT, and I posit that the “LinMobile” will follow shortly thereafter.

Many thanks to Steve for strengthening this piece about M17. What an exciting time to be involved in this evolution of digital amateur radio!

04 Revision to the Digital Radio News Gatherer

My Digital Radio News Gatherer (more here and here) was taking 10 minutes or more to process 100 information sources on the Raspberry Pi 5. I asked Claude: how can we improve the performance? The answer? Offload the processing to Groq.

Gatherer version 2 now takes about 15 seconds to do what Ollama was doing on the Raspberry Pi 5 in 10 minutes. That is amazing.

While I was in tinkering, I also tightened up the prompts to help reduce the amount of AI hallucination in the generated summary. I also made sure I understand how to add additional news sources (and did add more sources).

Interested? Read about the upgrade at EtherHam.com.

05 Coding with Claude

I’ve been enjoying getting a helping hand from Claude. Most recently, I asked Claude to build a tracking system for my home lab machines. It looks simple, and it actually is simple…but it is also useful for me.

If you would like to dive into more detail, see the Coding with Claude article on EtherHam.com. If you looked at Coding with Claude early this week, that article grew bigger over the course of the week!

The Lab Tracker

The Lab Tracker uses Python and SQLite on a Raspberry Pi 5. It’s got machine names, descriptions, IP/URL, username, types of access, tags, notes (an informal change log), and a bit more. The search box is a live search with some JavaScript magic.

Claude documented a summary of the system, which is probably enough if you want to ask Claude to build something like this for you. I’ve posted the summary over at EtherHam.com.

HF Watch

In the wee hours of the morning last Sunday, I thought of an app I’d like to have available. A cursory search suggested it did not exist (but if you know of a service or system like what I’m about to describe, please do let me know).

I had a 30-minute session with Claude at 3:00 am to develop what I call HF Watch. Every 15 minutes, it pulls the number of contacts in my Maidenhead grid square for each amateur radio band. The source of the data is PSKReporter, using their published API.

By Thursday afternoon, HF Watch had pulled nearly two million points:

What does this mean? HF Watch shows when each band was most and least active. That is significant information, but it gets more interesting when I set a DX grid square to see when amateurs in a distant location are active, and on what bands. This is the kind of information that can help me schedule when to try to get some of those elusive DX contacts.

I also incorporated signal-to-noise values because knowing the signal quality is just as important as knowing when the most stations are active.

I’ve added information about HF Watch to the Coding With Claude piece at EtherHam.

I also installed Cockpit on the Raspberry Pi 5 and added the Pi 5 Hardware Monitor package from GitHub. This has been a helpful addition, allowing me to easily monitor loads and temperatures.

06 SDR Follow-Up

My RTL-SDR v4 dongle is being difficult. I can’t get Zadig to see it, which means my Windows 11 machine isn’t seeing it. I’ve moved it to different USB ports, I’ve uninstalled the driver and started over, and it’s just being darned difficult.

So I pulled my whimsical little SDR dongle out of the package and plugged it in, in place of the RTL-SDR. I wasn’t expecting much, but Zadig found it immediately. I installed the driver, then ran rtl_test.exe. The Windows system not only sees it but is reading data.

Then I started rtl_tcp.exe on the host machine:

rtl_tcp.exe -a 0.0.0.0

Finally, I opened SDR++ on my laptop in another room. I selected RTL-TCP as the device type, entered the IP address of the host machine, then tuned to 98.1 FM (KING-FM Classical)…and enjoyed a couple of hours of wonderfully clear music.

The audio stream is booming in. Radios at the lake house typically barely pick up KING-FM so I am delighted with this outcome. I’m pretty impressed with this little dongle and you can’t beat the price ($38.95).

NESDR Nano 2 Plus - Tiny Black RTL-SDR USB Set (RTL2832U & R820T2) with Ultra-Low Phase Noise 0.5PPM TCXO, MCX Antenna (affiliate link)

For recreational listening, this is a great value. The other aspect of this small dongle is it doesn’t put much stress on the computer’s USB port, compared to the longer, heavier RTL-SDR.

Speaking of SDR, this project sounds very interesting: BrowSDR: Turn Your HackRF or RTL-SDR Into a Browser-Based Remote WebSDR.

The real killer feature is remote access. Using WebRTC, you can share your locally connected SDR and access it from anywhere in the world through a browser with no server setup required.

07 Short Stack of Interesting Finds

Digital Radio

• You Mean There’s More to Digital Modes than Making Contacts on FT8? — “Today I’m going to discuss some different digital modes that serve a deeper purpose than making contacts. We’ll look at ways to pass messages, forms, and other data back and forth beyond simply a signal report.”

Antennas

• Build Your Own Linked PackTenna EFHW: A Complete Guide — “The linked PackTenna design allows for multiple configurations, enabling users to operate on different bands without needing separate antennas. By using a simple four-link system, you can create antennas ranging from 10 to 40 meters.”

AI

• After two months of Open WebUI updates, I’d pick it over ChatGPT’s interface for local LLMs — Of interest to me because I’m running Open WebUI on my Raspberry Pi 5! It’s slow on the Pi, but it’s local and costs me nothing but electricity.

• Working around Claude’s strict limits taught me how to use it properly — “Some of the frustration lies in how these limits work. While some tools base your usage quota on your queries, your usage limit in Claude is not just based on how many messages you send. The number of messages you send plays a role, but so do the size of your attached files, the current conversation length, which tools Claude is using (such as web search), which model you're using, and whether Claude is creating artifacts.”

Computing / Linux / Raspberry Pi

• PocketTerm35 – A Raspberry Pi 4/5-based handheld Linux terminal with 3.5-inch touch display and built-in keyboard — Included because who doesn’t like an interesting gadget?

• 10 Ways to Reuse Old Hardware with Raspberry Pi — “A Raspberry Pi is perfect for giving old hardware a second life. With the right setup, it can turn almost anything into a useful device, from a simple monitor to a full home server. It’s a practical way to reuse spare equipment.”

• What is NextDNS? — This caught my eye because I use NextDNS. “Think of NextDNS as a “Firewall in the Cloud.” It provides the same ad-blocking and tracking protection as a Pi-hole, but instead of running on a Raspberry Pi in your living room, it runs on a global network of high-performance servers.”

08📋Digital Radio Digest

My Digital Radio News Gatherer (DRNG) bot did not find much of interest this week, and some of the information is not entirely fresh. Some items are clearly misclassified, so don’t get too wound up if you see information about a mode in the wrong place.

I’ve added a download button so you can see the raw news sources I gathered, if you are so inclined. DRNG was run 2026-04-16 17:57 UTC

Executive Summary

Recent developments in amateur radio digital voice and VoIP linking modes include updates to M17, with the M17 Gateway now supporting three hardware platforms, including the SX1255 HAT. The M17 project has also seen updates to its C++ library, specification, and tools. Additionally, there have been updates to the OpenRTX firmware, including support for vibration motors and changes to audio processing. The DMR mode has seen updates to the MMDVM Host software, primarily focused on fixes for D-Star logging.

Per-Mode Breakdown

DMR

The DMR mode has seen updates to the MMDVM Host software, with a recent commit (2026-04-16) focused on fixes for D-Star logging. Another commit (2026-04-07) updated the documentation to reflect the current state of the software.

D-STAR

There is no recent information available for the D-STAR mode.

YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X

The YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X mode has seen updates, including the release of WiRES-X 2.0, which was discussed in a Random Wire article. HamOperator has also published articles on customizing WiRES-X and solving ISP connection problems. Additionally, a WXScheduler project is available for WiRES-X.

M17

The M17 mode has seen significant updates, including the M17 Gateway now supporting three hardware platforms, including the SX1255 HAT. The M17 project has also seen updates to its C++ library, specification, and tools. The gr-m17 repository has seen updates, including improved Codec 2 blocks. The OpenRTX firmware has also been updated with changes relevant to M17, including support for vibration motors and changes to audio processing.

VoIP Linking

There is no recent information available for the VoIP Linking mode.

Notable Firmware or Software Updates

• M17 Gateway (Go): updated to support three hardware platforms, including the SX1255 HAT

• M17 C++ library: updated to match libm17 1.1.8

• OpenRTX firmware: updated with support for vibration motors and changes to audio processing

• MMDVM Host: updated with fixes for D-Star logging and documentation updates

Cross-Mode Developments

There are no notable cross-mode developments in the collected items.

Download raw news sources, text format

09📡 Band Conditions This Week

• Solar Flux Index (SFI): 141.0 — Good — solid conditions on 10m through 20m

• K-Index (current): 1.0 — Quiet — excellent conditions

• K-Index (7-day max): 4.3 — Minor storm — HF disruption likely

• A-Index: 15 — Unsettled (predicted)

• Sunspot Number: 85

• Active Solar Regions: 5

Solar flux holding at 141 gives the higher HF bands a real boost right now, so if you haven’t spent time on 10, 12, or 15 meters lately, this is a good week to remedy that — DX contacts and long-haul paths should be quite productive while the K-index sits at a quiet 1.

That said, the week wasn’t entirely smooth sailing; the 7-day max Kp touched 4.3, meaning there were some unsettled stretches that likely rattled the higher bands and pushed aurora-sensitive paths around, so if your logbook looks thin from a few days ago, that’s probably why.

With the predicted A-index still running at 15, a little residual unsettledness may linger, but today’s conditions are about as good as it gets for chasing DX.

Source: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (swpc.noaa.gov)

Generated: 2026-04-16 17:54 UTC

10 📻 This Week in Radio History

Notable events from April 13 through April 17, across the years.

1912 — Wireless in the Dark

In the early hours of April 15, 1912, the sinking of the RMS Titanic unfolded in the North Atlantic Ocean.

Aboard the ship, wireless operators Jack Phillips and Harold Bride tapped out distress calls — first CQD, then the newer SOS — as the scale of the disaster became clear. Those signals were picked up by the RMS Carpathia, which turned and ran hard through the night, ultimately rescuing more than 700 survivors.

Titanic didn’t just expose a tragedy — it exposed a system that wasn’t ready. Continuous radio watch wasn’t required. Distress handling wasn’t standardized. Critical warnings went unheard.

The aftermath led directly to the Radio Act of 1912, which brought structure to the airwaves: licensed operators, mandatory watches, and clear priority for distress traffic.

1925 — Hams Go Global

In April 1925, amateur radio operators from around the world gathered in Paris and did something ambitious: they organized.

The result was the International Amateur Radio Union, with Hiram Percy Maxim — co-founder of the ARRL — serving as its first president.

The mission was straightforward and urgent: give amateurs a unified voice in international spectrum negotiations, where commercial and government interests were already pressing in.

Nearly a century later, the IARU is still in that fight — protecting access, defending allocations, and making sure amateur radio remains more than just a historical footnote.

2000 — The Beginning of the End for Novice

On April 15, 2000, the Federal Communications Commission rolled out a sweeping overhaul of the amateur radio licensing system.

Six license classes were reduced to three. Testing was streamlined. The structure of entry into the hobby shifted.

The Novice license — once the on-ramp for generations of hams — wasn’t eliminated overnight, but this was the turning point. From here on, new operators largely entered through the Technician class, and the Novice began its quiet fade into history.

For decades, it had been the first signal for countless operators: limited privileges, simple exams, and just enough access to spark a lifelong pursuit.

It may be gone, but its imprint is everywhere — in the operators it created, and in the culture it helped build.

11 Signing Off

Vertical tabs

A pundit said to me: “You should be using vertical tabs in your web browser. It just works better.”

Instead of tabs across the top of the browser, vertical tabs are those same links positioned to the right or left side of the browser window. Making this change can give you more real estate (when you collapse the sidebar) for the content in front of you.

But it drove me nuts.

I tried it for about three days before I threw in the towel and reverted to tabs across the top of the browser. With normal tabs, the icons are larger. The lettering is larger. Yes, it consumes a bit more space in the browser, but I can actually see what those tabs say. I also have strong muscle memory about going to tabs across the top. I thought that three days would be long enough for me to start developing the habit of going to the sidebar, but I was wrong.

It’s true: vertical tabs use space better. Nevertheless, after trying that style, I chose to go back to what works nicely for me. I realized in this little experiment what a creature of habit I have become. I feel a bit more sane to not be fighting myself with every tab change.

Power bumps

I was in the middle of writing this issue when electrical power to the house started fluctuating. A steady rain is falling outside and it’s entirely possible that somewhere nearby, a tree fell on a power line or a vehicle hit a pole. I heard my uninterruptible power supply activate several times: click, click — click, click.

I don’t have everything on the UPS, just the most critical systems. My laptop has a battery so it doesn’t need the UPS. Some of my AllStar nodes have battery backup so they are not on the UPS. But other AllStar nodes, the cable modem, and the router are attached to the UPS.

CyberPower CP1000AVRLCD Intelligent LCD UPS Battery Backup and Surge Protector, 1000VA/600W, 9 Outlets, AVR, Mini-Tower, UL Certified (affiliate link)

Today, I’m very glad to have spent the money on this device!

EtherHam CDN hiccups

Several site visitors have reported missing images and content on the EtherHam.com site. The CDN company is trying something else so if you have a moment, please jump over to EtherHam.com, browse a few articles, and then let me know if any images are missing or can’t be loaded.

Icom IC-7300 MK2

I’ve been getting on the radio in the evening (rarely, early in the morning). My QRZ page shows the latest log entries. I’ve been working FT8 and slowly picking up more countries. It feels good to be more active on HF.

73, and remember to touch a radio every day!

I saw a bump in subscribers after getting some positive press in the always great Zero Retries newsletter, so I know some folks reading this issue are new to the Random Wire space.

First, if you are new here: welcome! In the words of Galatea in the movie Bicentennial Man (as near as I can remember): “you’re unique, I’m unique, we’re the same!” We’re all radio enthusiasts here. You are in good company.

Second, the name Random Wire is a play on words. As amateur radio enthusiasts, we’re aware of what a random wire antenna is. And many of us might remember when telegraphy involved sending a wire. Says Google:

In telegraphy, "sending a wire" meant transmitting a telegram—a short, urgent message sent via electrical signals along physical, long-distance wires.

I cover varying topics (that’s the random part) within the broad, squishy limits of two realms: amateur radio and technology. I try to cover important news, particularly in the digital radio space. (That content is the urgent wire part).

I also write about what I’m doing. Small projects, big projects. What went right and what went wrong. It’s all fair game. My station is a complex, ever-changing mix of old and new technology. Translation: things break and I get to learn more by fixing those problems.

You never know quite what you’ll get from week to week, because I rarely know what I’ll be writing about more than a few weeks ahead of time. I think of this as the charm of the Random Wire newsletter, but you may find it too unstructured and disorganized for your taste…and that’s okay. The Random Wire is published at 0500 hours Pacific time every Friday.

I hope the Random Wire will be a vehicle for conversations. I do post how-to articles called TechNotes, along with other long-form articles, at the Random Wire’s sister site: EtherHam.com. I think of the Random Wire as the newsletter for EtherHam.com. If you use computers in any way to enhance your amateur radio experience, then you are an EtherHam.

Finally, do join in. Leave a comment. Ask questions, help others by responding. We all learn and grow from our conversations. Write an article. Or just read the Random Wire when you have a few moments to relax. It’s all good here. Welcome.

Leave a comment

Listen to Artemis II and Mission Control

I wonder how many of us became interested in radio because of hearing live audio between Mission Control and astronauts in space? That’s what captured my imagination as a child.

If you have EchoLink, IRLP, or AllStar, you can listen to live audio. Go to https://space.rfnet.link/ for the details. If you’re reading this before 5 pm Pacific on Friday, April 10, you have time to catch the reentry and splashdown of Artemis II.

NASA’s Artemis II mission is scheduled to splash down off the coast of San Diego at approximately 8:07 p.m. EDT (5:07 p.m. PDT) on Friday, April 10.

WiRES-X 2.0 Is Here — and It’s Got Some Explaining to Do

If you’ve been putting off looking at WiRES-X lately, now is a good time to catch up. Yaesu released version 2.00 of the WiRES-X PC software earlier this year, and it’s a bigger deal than a typical point release.

This one changes things at the network level. If you’re a node operator running version 1.57, some of what follows is going to matter.

What Changed

Version 2.00 is closely tied to Yaesu’s new FTX-1 transceiver series. With recent firmware updates, the FTX-1 gains WiRES-X support using a different connection model: a direct USB-C link to the PC, with no HRI-200 required.

That’s a meaningful simplification—fewer boxes, fewer cables, and a much cleaner entry point for new node operators.

But that simplicity comes with a side effect: the network no longer behaves like a single, uniform environment.

The Backward Compatibility Wrinkle

Version 2.00 introduces updated networking behavior, and nodes on different versions don’t always communicate the same way.

If you want to run a room that still accepts connections from nodes on version 1.57 or earlier, you may need:

• A publicly reachable IP address (or properly configured port forwarding)

• UDP ports 46114, 46120, and 46122 open and mapped

This isn’t entirely new—but it does appear to be less forgiving than before. Nodes that “just worked” behind typical home routers may now require explicit configuration.

The failure mode is subtle: a node may connect successfully, yet fail to pass audio or control traffic reliably. That’s the kind of problem that looks like everything is working—until it isn’t.

The Firmware Cascade

Version 2.00 raises the floor on firmware requirements across much of the C4FM lineup.

Radios commonly affected include:

• FT5D

• FT3D

• FTM-510D

• FTM-500D

• FTM-300D

Each may require specific MAIN, SUB, and DSP versions to interoperate cleanly.

If you’re running a node, check everything in your chain before upgrading. Discovering a mismatch halfway through setup is a reliable way to turn a quick upgrade into a long evening.

What Should You Do?

Don’t rush this one. Instead:

• Read the release notes carefully

• Verify firmware across all radios in your setup

• Review your router configuration (especially port forwarding)

• Decide whether you need backward compatibility before upgrading

If you’re just a user connecting through someone else’s node, you’ll likely notice very little—as long as your local node operator has already done the work.

Bottom Line

WiRES-X 2.00 is a meaningful step forward.

• The USB-C node model is cleaner and more accessible

• The network behavior appears more structured (and possibly more reliable)

• But the transition introduces real-world friction, especially around NAT and legacy compatibility

There’s nothing unusual about this kind of evolution—but it does reward operators who understand what’s happening under the hood. And right now, that understanding matters.

Upgrade Checklist (Quick Reference)

Before you click “update,” run through this checklist:

☐ Confirm your use case
Are you running a room that needs to support older (1.57) nodes?

☐ Check radio firmware
Verify MAIN / SUB / DSP versions on every radio in your node chain.

☐ Review your network setup

• Do you have a publicly reachable IP (or working port forwarding)?

• Are UDP ports 46114, 46120, 46122 open and mapped correctly?

☐ Document your current setup
Screenshots and notes make rollback possible if needed.

☐ Plan for downtime
This is not a zero-risk upgrade—give yourself time to troubleshoot.

☐ Upgrade in stages (if possible)
Don’t change firmware, PC software, and network config all at once.

☐ Test both directions
Confirm you can both connect and pass audio/control reliably.

Switched HF Antenna to M0CV0 “Magitenna”

I’ve had this wire-plus-transformer antenna in a box for months and finally pulled it out and got it up in the air. The Magitenna is only 7.6 meters long and is said to operate from 6 to 40 meters.

The coax feedline acts as the counterpoise. I have the antenna earthed with a wire going to a stake in the ground. The antenna is strung on a flexible fiberglass mast that is tied off to the wood deck railing with a few pieces of nylon string. (The other wires in the photo are a much longer end-fed half wave antenna and the arborist line I used to pull it up to a branch.)

In my installation, the SWR on 6 meters is around 4:1 (as reported at very low power by my Icom IC-7300 MK2 radio) so unusable. However, when I added a large ferrite with five wraps of the coax, that changed the performance. The SWR dropped into the 2:1 range: acceptable. Apparently, the ferrite made the coax portion of the antenna system look shorter to the antenna.

SWR on 10 meters is perfect and on 12 meters it’s about 2.5:1 (usable). It’s 1:1 on 15 and nearly 1:1 on 20 and 40. On 17 meters, SWR is about 3.2:1. (But while I was testing on FT8 on 17 meters, W4EIS responded to my CQ. We logged that contact.) On 30 meters, SWR is 2.6:1.

As expected, SWR is high on 80 meters, around 4:1.

Overall, I’m pleased with this antenna. It is short enough that it works nicely with the telescoping fiberglass mast, and by putting some tension on the mast, the sections seem much less likely to collapse during a temporary deployment. Adding a big fat snap-on ferrite improved the SWR in the magic band (6 meters). If you are working POTA, SOTA, or emergency comms, this short antenna seems like a viable choice.

I ran across one problem. Two nights ago, my SWR on 17 meters was 1:1. Perfect. Last night, it was 3:1. Scratching my head a bit, I started checking connections, moving from the back of the radio to the antenna. The wing nut that secures the antenna wire to the balun (or is it an unun?) box was slightly loose, like half-a-turn loose. I tightened that finger tight and checked SWR. Back to 1:1. Whew.

Overall, I’m pleased with this compact antenna. Just earth it and make sure your connections are tight.

Speaking of antennas, I haven’t given up on the Painter Pole antenna. I ran across affordable delta loop antennas at https://www.ni4l.com/. To assess the quality and usability of delta loops at the lake house, I ordered the 10-meter version for $89. When you consider the price of wire and a balun, this is a good value. I anticipate mounting it to the painter pole but we’ll see. It will take a few weeks for the antenna to be constructed and delivered, and I’ll report on it then. Their 40-meter delta loop is $129.99. That sounds costly for some wire and a box, but that’s about the best I could do if I was sourcing wire and a 4:1 balun on my own. I’m really hoping the 10-meter loop works so I can consider adding the 40-meter or 20-meter loop to my kit.

Installed LLM on a Raspberry Pi

Let me start with a few statements to set the stage. Do I trust the exponential growth of artificial intelligences and associated technology? No. Do I want to be left behind? No. Do I think such tech can be useful? Yes.

But how does one figure out if AI can be helpful? Just try it.

I use ChatGPT for some things like creating graphics and diagrams. I use Claude for proofreading and helping with coding. This week, I took another step into the deeper end of the pool by installing Ollama on a Raspberry Pi 5 computer at home. Ollama is an LLM (Large Language Model) engine.

I’m using Ollama to drive what I call a Digital Radio News Gatherer. This service runs on the RPi 5. It reaches out weekly to various places on the internet to look for new information about DMR, D-STAR, YSF/C4FM/WiRES-X, and M17.

Interested? Head on over to EtherHam.com for Creating a Digital Radio News Gatherer Service.

Bluetooth Device Nag

I had some trouble with my home network last week. It was during a windstorm and — I’m guessing — a tree probably fell across a line somewhere. I live in an area with hordes of 200-foot-tall trees that are close to roads and power lines. Falling trees disrupting our power or internet is certainly not uncommon.

Once the network came back online, some of my home devices did not want to connect. Something had changed. I monkeyed with settings and restarted machines but there were still a few stubborn holdouts. Some of those difficult connections were actually Bluetooth connections between my Android phone and several devices. Out of frustration, I finally took the nuclear option route and reset all connections on my phone.

That resolved most of my issues, although I did have to then find all my Bluetooth earbuds that wanted to be connected. One Bluetooth connection, though, was nagging me every minute or so. It went on all night and by the next morning, I was ready to throw the offending device in the lake, if only I could figure out which device was the offender.

The problem with Bluetooth nags like this is they don’t tell you what device is trying to connect. It’s just “BLESmart_xyzxyzxyzxyzxyz.” I dug around for some advice and tried a few Bluetooth device finding apps. The one I found most helpful is called nRF Connect for Mobile. I downloaded and installed that app on my Android phone, and when I scanned for Bluetooth signals, it picked up several. The best part: for some devices, it showed the manufacturer’s name.

That proved to be the key. The name of the device that was nagging me was not tied to headphones or earbuds. Instead, it was the Bluetooth-equipped blood pressure cuff we use daily with my spouse. Once I paired that device with my phone, the nagging stopped. If you find yourself in a similar situation, give nRF Connect a try.

Installed Transceive on my iMac

$20 for an AllStarLink app seems a bit steep, except for one thing: Transceive works brilliantly. It’s Tuesday morning and I’ve been listening to a couple of nets this morning with a pair of nice Plantronics headphones. Very clean audio that doesn’t disturb anyone else in the room is a great thing.

Setup was a bit challenging for me. I followed the guides in the Transceive documentation but kept hitting speed bumps. First, my AllStarLink.org password wasn’t accepted, at least not at first. I think it finally stuck on the sixth try. Second, setting up a connection with any of my nodes that are WT enabled did not work. This should have worked, said the help docs, but it didn’t, at least not until I went to advanced settings and specified the IP address and port of the node. That makes sense for my nodes with non-standard ports, but the one with the standard port 4569 also failed until I explicitly configured Transceive with its IP and port number. I’ve reached out to the vendor for clarification on this.