The Ham radio category covers amateur radio technology, operating techniques and practical station building. Topics include HF, VHF and UHF communication, antennas, transceivers, tuners, digital modes, portable radio, SOTA/POTA operation, propagation, repeaters, SDR receivers, feed lines, grounding, station accessories and real-world radio performance. The articles are written for licensed radio amateurs, beginners preparing for the hobby and technical readers interested in long-distance radio communication.
Every August, the Perseids return with the kind of reliability that makes them feel almost personal. They are not a rare eclipse, not a once-in-a-lifetime comet, not a celestial accident that demands frantic travel and a cloud-free horizon on one specific evening. They are a summer ritual, a familiar crossing of Earth through the dusty…
On a quiet evening, a newly licensed amateur radio operator can sit in front of a transceiver, turn the dial across the high-frequency bands, and hear almost nothing that sounds like the future. There may be a hiss of atmospheric noise, a few whistles from digital signals, perhaps a distant voice fading in and out…
The quiet ritual of amateur satellite tracking began with a small block of text that looked almost deliberately unromantic. Two dense lines of numbers, spaces, decimals, and checksums would arrive in a bulletin, be copied into a tracking program, and suddenly the invisible machinery of orbital motion became visible on a computer screen. A satellite…
There is a quiet revolution taking place in amateur radio, and it does not look like a revolution at first. It looks like a laptop on a kitchen table, a Raspberry Pi humming next to a transceiver in the basement, a waterfall display stretched across a large monitor, or an operator tuning across the HF…
For nearly a decade, Xiegu has steadily transformed from a relatively unknown Chinese manufacturer into one of the most recognizable names in affordable software-defined radios. What began with compact QRP transceivers has evolved into a diverse product lineup that now competes with products from long-established Japanese brands. The company’s latest announcement—the Xiegu G7250—may represent its…
Portable amateur radio has always carried a certain romance. Long before touchscreens, waterfall displays and USB audio interfaces became normal in the field, operators were already carrying modest HF transceivers into the hills, into forests, onto campsites and into public parks. The equipment was rarely perfect. Batteries were heavy, antennas were improvised, logging was often…
