One of my hobbies is ham/amateur radio. On this page, you’ll find a lot of cool things I have done and useful resources relating to ham radio that I have found and collected over time.
Having an interest in electronics, ham radio has always seemed interesting to me. My wife gave me an excuse to dive into the world of ham radio when she got me a Baofeng UV-5R radio for Christmas 2025. Mind you, I didn’t have a license, so I couldn’t transmit, but I sure had a fun time learning about repeaters and listening into other’s transmissions.
After this, I got into using SDR radio, four of them, actually. I used them to peruse the ham airwaves with SDR++ as well as using SDRTrunk to listen to local and statewide trunked P25 radio. This was really fun and once again a great learning experience in radio.
After this, I experimented with building a few different DIY antennas. A tape measure Yagi-Uda, copper pipe 2m/70cm J-pole, 70cm ground plane, and a 20/40m attic wire dipole. That last one may have been one of the simplest contructions, but definitely the biggest pain to install, with a lot of crawling around in a cramped, hot attic.
The next radio I purchased for myself after this was another Baofeng, the DM-32UV. I noticed that there were some DMR repeaters in my area, and that they seemed to be a lot more active the the regular FM repeaters in the area, so this was a natural choice.
