March 4, 2026
Figure 1: My thoughts on PHP and WordPress
You may have noticed I moved the store to Shopify
about a month ago. Now I’ve also moved the blog. This is a purely static site
rendered by Hugo, hosted on a server I manage. Let me know what you think.
tl;dr
Store is now on Shopify. Blog is now static and self-hosted. WordPress sucks.
For now there’s no comment system (I’m open to suggestions) and some content
hasn’t been moved yet - find it on the old blog for
now.
If the trivia of administering this project doesn’t interest you feel free to
stop reading now. The rest of this post is mostly me complaining.
This post was supposed to be short, just a quick update to say “I made a better
PicoFox”. It was supposed to be a marketing piece driving sales, expressing
gratitude to the community for great feedback, etc, etc, etc. What foolish
thoughts I had!
Instead this post is a 1,691 word discussion of dumb decisions and the
frustrations of engineering tradeoffs. Also, I made a better PicoFox.
September 13, 2025
Figure 1: Bits of cured urethane that were supposed to be buttons.
I was the type that hated showing my work in math class. Who cares how I got to the answer, it’s
correct isn’t it? Math always came easily to me so I’d often combine two or three steps in my head.
Being told to show my work felt like an arbitrary and meaningless requirement, or maybe an
accusation that I was cheating.
That’s not how I see things today. In my last post, The PicoFox Saga, I
showed my process. Dumb ideas, wrong turns, and outright failures; if I left anything out it was for
brevity. I did that while trying to market the PicoFox as a product. (I still am – you should
buy one.)
August 16, 2025
Figure 1: PicoFox r2 PCB up close.
Have you ever had an idea so spectacularly dumb you had to make it happen?
After seeing several SI5351 based transmitters for HF I had the idea that maybe this chip could be
pushed to do frequency modulation on VHF bands. It does glitchless frequency changes, it can generate
VHF clocks, it even claims a 0 PPM error. We all know that last part is nonsense but the error is so
low that we can pretend that it’s zero and just select an appropriate input oscillator.
This is a spectacularly dumb idea. There are a hundred better ways to implement frequency modulation
from simple analog circuits to full software defined radio. This is a middle ground that no one
asked for but the idea was just so tempting to me and I couldn’t find a single technical reason not
to do it.
I won’t bury the lede – I built the darn thing and it’s a great fox transmitter. Easy to configure
just by editing a text file, extra GPIO for adding external devices, open source hardware and
software so you can tinker to your heart’s content. It’s great, you should buy one. They’re in stock
and shipping right now.
July 19, 2025
Figure 1: Antennas don't work, but the sunset was pretty.
This year’s field day was an adventure. Great times were had by all but I could not have created
more technical difficulties if I had been trying for the record.
Let’s back up. After last year’s field day, fueled by excitement and more than a little hubris, I
volunteered to build and captain a VHF/UHF station this year. I’d seen some early success building
rotators and antennas for satellite operations. With nearly a year of prep time I knew I could build
an amazing station.
I’m still a little ways off from shipping the first kits but my shop is filling up with parts!
Nearly all the components for the T41 kits have come in; thousands of capacitors, transistors,
voltage regulators, relays, and more. That’s not to mention the packaging materials. Have you ever
seen 3,000 zip-top bags in one place?
Today on Stupid Solutions to Stupid Problems – a postage stamp sized PCB for putting an SMA port
on, well, whatever.
Several times on recent projects I’ve had to try to pass RF around between boards that don’t have
footprints for coaxial connectors. I’ve tried various methods such as just soldering a bit of
micro-coax to the board or using 0.1″ headers but none of them are satisfactory.
August 5, 2024
One of Jack & Al's first T41 builds.
If you’re interested in a kit to build the T41-EP open source transceiver please send me an email
(justin@ai6ym.radio). I’ve been unable to find anything in stock for
myself so, with the blessing of the creators, I’ll be running a small batch of them.
July 12, 2024
Sunrise over the bay from my campsite.
Somehow I’ve avoided operating on Field Day for the seven years I’ve been licensed. Life always
found a way to keep me busy on the fourth full weekend of June. This year I finally made it out,
joining PAARA at
Bedwell Bayfront Park.
I’ll admit that I skimmed the announcement so I wasn’t expecting super-stations run out of the back
of U-Haul vans or to be operating from a part of the park normally inaccessible to vehicles.
I had a great time on Saturday operating from the
P3 Orion preserved at the
Moffett Field Museum. In honor of their 91st birthday the
museum has opened up their P3 Orion for visitors (and brought out a few other special exhibits I
won’t spoil for you). With the help of Mike “The Noisy Kid” Gitschel (K6QFO), CW stations are
operating in both the museum and the aircraft.
