Category: Technology
HamClock and OpenHamClock – The Perfect Shack Dashboard
Every operator knows the routine: you sit down at the rig ready to work HF and wonder — what are the propagation conditions right now? When is the next grey line ? Where are the DX…
MeshCore for Children and Teenagers: What Is Allowed in Austria
MeshCore needs no licence and has no minimum age. That makes it the lowest-threshold radio system there is for children. The pitfalls are not in radio law but in location data, liability and what happens in the chat.
Receiving Paragliders and Gliders: An OGN Station and OpenWebRX+ on One Raspberry Pi
There is more in the air above the Alps than the eye can see: paragliders on FANET, gliders on FLARM, plus ADS-L and home-built ESP32 trackers. Anyone with an antenna on 868 MHz can receive all of it, feed the Open Glider Network, and still run a WebSDR on the same Raspberry Pi. What it gives you, what it costs and how to do it.
Remote Shack: Control Your Amateur Radio Station from Anywhere
The station sits where the antenna belongs and you sit somewhere else. What that actually takes: software from free to expensive, the networking problem called CGNAT, honest latency figures and the Austrian legal position under TKG 2021.
Stealth Antennas for Apartments and HOAs: Invisible Operation
There are two kinds of radio amateurs without an antenna. Those who are not allowed one, and those who do not dare to ask. Both end up at the same question: how do you run a…
LoRa Gateway with an Amateur Radio Licence: Bridging RF and IP Networks
LoRa devices carry messages over kilometres, but somewhere that RF traffic has to cross into an IP network: the internet, HAMNET or a map. That is what a gateway does. Holding an amateur licence lets you…
Antenna Tuners: Manual vs. Automatic — Which Is Better?
Few pieces of gear in the shack are as widely misunderstood as the matching unit. Everybody calls it an antenna tuner, and the name is the first thing that misleads: the antenna is not being tuned…
Meshtastic, MeshCore and MeshCom in the waterfall: reading LoRa with OpenWebRX+
Until recently, finding out whether there is real mesh activity in your valley meant putting up a node and waiting. There is another way now: OpenWebRX+ decodes LoRa packets right in the browser , covering Meshtastic,…
Understanding Baluns and Ununs: Proper Impedance Matching
Few components in a shack are bought as often and understood as rarely as the balun. It is treated as a cure for poor SWR, for interference on the neighbour's television and for RF on the…
Meshtastic in Practice: Off-Grid Messaging with LoRa Mesh
Sending text messages, sharing GPS positions and receiving sensor data, without the internet, without a mobile network, without mains power. And all of it with hardware costing around 35 euros. What sounded like a niche project…
Radio from the eternal ice: Neumayer Station III and DP0GVN
In 2023, 160 pupils from Hermagor worked Antarctica via QO-100. On 20 September, someone who actually lived down there comes to Villach and tells how it really was.
Icom IC-7110: the X-026 concept becomes a production radio
For four months the X-026 was a mock-up without a spec sheet. At the Tokyo Ham Fair Icom finally answered: it is the IC-7110, successor to the IC-7100. What is confirmed, what is missing — and why the 70 MHz on the spec sheet is its own story in Austria.
