Why W9ACW.com?

2026-09-04T00:00:00Z

This a place of my own on the web to document the things I build, repair, modify, experiment with, and occasionally break along the way.

My hobbies tend to overlap. Amateur radio leads to antennas, electronics, software, networking, and test equipment. Overlanding and four-wheel-drive travel lead to vehicle projects, communications systems, camping equipment, fabrication, and finding ways to make all of that equipment work reliably far from home. Then there are the projects that start with a simple question and somehow end several weekends later with a soldering iron, a 3D printer, an oscilloscope, and parts scattered across the workbench.

This site is intended to be a home for all of it.

More workshop notebook than publication

I don't intend for this to become a blog that needs a new post every Tuesday. I'll write when I have something worth documenting—a project, an experiment, an interesting problem, a trip, or something I've learned that might be useful to somebody else.

One of my main reasons for creating the site is simply documentation. I've found that a project makes perfect sense while I'm working on it, but six months later I may be wondering why I chose a particular component, how I wired something, or what measurements led me in a particular direction. Keeping good project records is a long-standing practice among radio experimenters for exactly that reason.

Putting those notes on the web has an additional benefit: somebody else may find them useful.

When practical, I'd like the project pages here to contain enough information that another hobbyist can actually reproduce what I've built—schematics, dimensions, parts lists, configuration files, software, 3D-printable parts, measurements, test results, and, perhaps most importantly, the mistakes and dead ends encountered along the way.

That philosophy is very much in keeping with amateur radio's homebrew tradition: experiment, learn how something works, document it, and share what you learned so somebody else can build on it.

Why W9ACW?

The name of the site has some history behind it.

W9ACW was originally my grandfather's amateur-radio call sign. He became a licensed amateur operator in 1939 and remained involved with radio throughout his life, operating HF phone, CW and RTTY and participating in contests. He operated first from Huntington, Indiana, and later for many years from Brazil, Indiana.

I was only a child when he passed away, but many years later I became an amateur-radio operator myself and eventually acquired his old call sign.

So W9ACW represents more to me than simply the identifier the FCC assigned to my station. It is a connection between generations and to a tradition of experimenting with technology that began in my family long before I was born.

Read the history of W9ACW →

Building things is only half the fun

I've always enjoyed understanding how things work, rather than simply using them. Sometimes that means restoring or modifying old equipment. Sometimes it means designing something new. Other times it means taking several existing technologies and making them do something their manufacturers probably never anticipated.

Radio, technology and the road

Amateur radio will probably make up a large portion of the technical material here, but it won't be the only subject.

My 80 Series Toyota Land Cruiser is another continuing project and also provides a way to combine several interests. Radio equipment, antennas, electrical systems, navigation, networking, camping equipment and vehicle modifications all become much more interesting when the goal is to make them work together reliably while traveling somewhere well beyond the pavement.

So expect some mixture of ham radio, electronics, computers, networking, fabrication, 3D printing, Land Cruisers, overlanding, camping, repair work, and whatever other technical rabbit hole happens to look interesting at the time.

There won't be a rigid schedule or even a rigid definition of what belongs here.

That's intentional.

If it helps someone else, even better

The Internet has been an extraordinary resource for nearly every project I've undertaken. Countless times I've found an old web page, forum post, schematic, photograph, GitHub repository, or someone's carefully documented experiment containing exactly the obscure bit of information I needed.

I'd like W9ACW.com to contribute a little bit back to that pool of knowledge.

If something documented here gives another amateur an idea, helps someone repair an old radio, saves a few hours troubleshooting a problem, provides a starting point for a better design, or inspires somebody to build a project of their own, then publishing it was worthwhile.

And if you build one of my projects and improve upon it, I'd like to hear about that too.

That's really what this site is about:

Build things. Experiment. Go places. Get on the air. Document what you learn. And leave enough information behind for the next person to take it a little further.

73,
W9ACW

What is amateur radio?

2026-09-04T00:00:00Z

Amateur radio ("ham radio") is a licensed radio service that lets individuals build, experiment with, and operate their own radio equipment across dozens of frequency allocations. Licensees can talk to other operators across town or on the other side of the planet, without relying on any commercial network or infrastructure in between.

That last part is the appeal. A radio, a wire in a tree, and a battery are enough to put a signal into another continent. Nothing else has to be working for that to happen.

The hobby covers a genuinely wide range of interests:

Operating & DXing

Making contacts — casual conversation, chasing distant countries (DX), contesting, or working portable from parks and summits.

Antennas & homebrew

Designing, building, and measuring antennas, baluns, filters, and accessories. The cheapest part of the station is usually the most consequential one.

Digital modes

Weak-signal modes like FT8 and JS8, plus packet, APRS, and Winlink — computers and radios doing the listening together.

Public service

Emergency and event communications, where a network that works with no infrastructure stops being a hobby and starts being useful.

Bands and modes, briefly

Amateur allocations run from below the AM broadcast band up into the microwaves. In practice most activity clusters in a few places:

Range	Typical bands	What it's good for
HF	160, 80, 40, 20, 15, 10 meters	Long distance via ionospheric propagation — worldwide contacts, no repeaters
VHF	6 and 2 meters	Local and regional work, repeaters, mostly line-of-sight
UHF	70 centimeters	Local repeaters, satellites, handheld radios

The common modes are SSB (voice), CW (Morse code, still remarkably effective for the power used), FM (local repeater work), and digital modes such as FT8, which trade speed for the ability to decode signals well below the noise floor.

Getting licensed

In the United States the FCC issues three license classes, each earned by passing a written exam with no Morse code requirement:

Technician — full VHF/UHF privileges plus limited HF. The usual starting point.
General — most HF privileges, which is where worldwide operating opens up.
Amateur Extra — all amateur privileges.

Volunteer examiners administer the tests, the question pools are published, and the study material is freely available. Many people go from nothing to Technician in a couple of weeks of evenings.

W9ACW — Blog