Rusty Ring

Like a lot of old people, I've come to find myself adrift at Christmas. Family mostly gone. Friends busy with their own. I nev...

I've been gratified over the years to encounter a small but steady circle of fellow hermits on social media. It's always encour...

I had never heard of this alt hymn, or the artists who built it, or even the television series that launched it, before I first heard i...

(As a warm-up for building myself a new radio, I put this together. It's for securing a printed circuit board while solder...

(Radio operators are weird about their equipment. We love to look at it. I take photos every time I set up in a new place. This time it...

(My thirty-year-old OHR high-frequency CW [Morse code] transceiver, set up at the home of friends. My friends are biologists, and their...

(Because I'm always on my own when I set up the radio on the road, I seldom have any photos of me operating it. This came to my attent...

(Friends lent me this tiny cabin high on a forested ridge to use as a radio shack for two weeks. One of the nicest and most radio-frie...

Note to readers: I'm in the process of moving this blog to a new host. Please be alert for a URL change in the next weeks. ...

(Works in a pinch. [See what I did there?])

(Model 26003a flameproof telegraph key. Same one used in the radio rooms of American merchant and military vessels during WWII. Stil...

In Auntie's War: The BBC during the Second World War , Edward Stourton drops a bombshell. He's talking about how radio – the...

(Almost exactly a year ago I posted a Wordless Wednesday entry on my longwire block invention . The prototype in that photo was cumb...

(This is a 40 meter Morse code receiver I recently put together from a kit. [Sorry for the low resolution; it's a phone shot.] N...

( The transceiver is those two tiny stacked boxes beside the headphones. [ The key is unseen behind it.] Technology has changed ...

(My QRP rig set up in a friend's back garden.)

Me at my station. Note how state-of-the-art it looks now that I've replaced all the knobs with rotary encoders. Last year, after ...

UPDATE: See the final design here . (This is a longwire block. It provides a quick means to anchor a longwire antenna – used in ad h...

(Every New Year's Day brasspounders observe Straight Key Night. During this 24-hour period [1 January UTC, 0000 to 2359], we esc...

(Doyenne of the offshore pirates, since gone straight but still just as cutting-edge. Hear her here. )