BLOG

HAM-HQ is free to use, and I like it that way. It has monthly costs for the server, domain, email, and data feeds, which I happily cover myself. It's my hobby, and it's been one of the most rewarding things I've built.

A few weeks ago I quietly added a SUPPORT HAM HQ link to the footer at the bottom of the page. I put it there on purpose, because I never want this site to feel like it's asking you for something every time you load it.

If HAM-HQ has become part of your routine and you'd like to help cover those costs, that link takes you to a secure one-time checkout through Stripe. There's no subscription and nothing recurring. If you'd rather not, or can't, that's completely fine. Using the site, submitting nets, and sending me feedback already helps more than you'd think.

That's it. Back to radio. Thanks for being here.

73 de Corbin, K8CWS

If you signed up for HAM-HQ or tried to reset your password between late August and today, there's a good chance the email you were waiting for never showed up. I'm sorry about that. It was a problem on our end, not anything you did.

Here's what happened, in plain terms. The website sends its email through Google. Sometime in August, Google started quietly turning away some of our server's connections, and nothing on our end raised an alarm. Verification links, password resets, and a few grid-request updates simply never went out.

I found the problem today and fixed it. The server now connects to Google in a way it reliably accepts, and I've tested every kind of email the site sends.

If you were affected, I've emailed you directly with what you need: a fresh verification link, or a way to request a new password reset. If you're still stuck on anything, reply to any HAM-HQ email or use the contact form and I'll sort it out personally.

Thanks for your patience, and for sticking with HAM-HQ. I hope a rough first experience won't keep you from enjoying the site.

73 de Corbin, K8CWS

My first Dayton Hamvention is done, and I am writing this completely wiped out in the best possible way. Three days of walking, talking, learning, and meeting people. It exceeded everything I hoped it would be, and it absolutely flattened me. Both things are true. If you have never been, go anyway, and wear good shoes.

The highlight of the final day was the Parks on the Air 2.0 forum. Kevin Thomas, W1DED, and a colleague walked through where the platform is headed, and I left that room genuinely fired up. POTA (pota.app) has become one of my favorite parts of this hobby, and the rebuild they are working toward sounds like exactly the kind of modern, faster foundation the program deserves. I am excited about it as a user. I am maybe more excited about it as a developer, because a stronger POTA platform opens real doors for tying POTA more deeply into HAM-HQ. I am not going to over-promise anything yet, but the wheels are turning.

Here is the thing worth sitting with: POTA is volunteer-built. The 2.0 effort is a real undertaking and it runs on donated time and money. If POTA has given you anything, this is a good moment to give back. You can donate at docs.pota.app/docs/donate.html, and if you are a developer who can lend time to the upgrade effort, the volunteer page at docs.pota.app/docs/volunteers.html is where to start. They could use the help, and it is the kind of work that pays forward to the whole community.

But the part of this weekend I will remember longest is not a forum or a booth. It is the people. My wife and I got to meet Rod, W8JAX, and Wendy, K8JAX, in person. They check into the Barometer Net every morning from Florida, and they are voices we know well. Putting faces and handshakes to those callsigns, with my wife right there next to me, was one of those moments that reminds you what this hobby actually is. It was one of many highlights, but that one was extra special for the both of us.

That was the throughline of the entire weekend, honestly. The AMSAT forum with my elmer N8MH. Meeting Budd from Buddipole. The HAM-HQ users who tracked me down on 145.250 and stopped to say hi. The conversations that I think are quietly going to shape where this site goes next. I came home with a notebook full of ideas and a head full of names, and I am still processing all of it.

So where does HAM-HQ go from here? I am not ready to lay out specifics, and I would rather under-promise and over-deliver. But I will say this: I left Xenia more motivated about this project than I have been since I started it. Some of that is the ideas. Most of it is the people. The connections I made this weekend matter, and a few of them are going to show up in this site in ways I think you will like.

To everyone who found me, introduced themselves, shared an idea, or just said they use the site: thank you. Genuinely. You are the reason this is fun. Now I am going to rest and recover for a day or two, and then I am going to get back to building.

73 de Corbin, K8CWS

Final day of Dayton Hamvention. Before I head back in, a quick word on yesterday, because Day 2 was one of those days where everything just lined up.

The highlight was the AMSAT (amsat.org) forum. One of the presenters was Mark Hammond, N8MH, who is my elmer. Sitting in that room watching one of the people who got me into this hobby talk about putting amateur radio in space is not a thing I'm going to forget. If you have any interest in satellites at all, the stuff AMSAT is working on is worth your attention.

I also got to meet Budd, the founder of Buddipole (buddipole.com), and we had a great conversation. I've spent enough time fighting with portable antennas to know exactly who he is, so getting to just talk shop with him for a while was a real one for me.

The rest of the day was people. A few more HAM-HQ users found me, and I had a couple of conversations that I think genuinely change what comes next for this site. I'm not going to get into specifics yet, but I left those conversations more excited about where this is going than I've been in a while.

I also finally walked the entire flea market. All of it. If you've done it, you know what that sentence means. Worth every step.

Today I want to catch the Parks on the Air 2.0 forum at 10:25 in Room 1. POTA (parksontheair.com) is one of my favorite parts of this hobby right now, and I'm curious where it's headed, partly because I keep thinking about how to tie it more tightly into HAM-HQ. After that it's loose ends: the booths I never got real time at because of the crowds, and whatever closeout deals I can talk myself into on the last day.

I'll still be on 145.250 simplex if you want to find me before it wraps up.

73 de Corbin, K8CWS

Day one is in the books and it was a massive success. I talked with more people than I can count, ran into a couple of HAM-HQ users in the wild, and made a few connections I think are going to matter. This is exactly why people kept telling me I had to go. They were right.

First, an important update for anyone trying to find me on the air. I'm simplifying things. Forget the repeater list from the earlier post. For the rest of the weekend I'll be monitoring 145.250 MHz simplex. If you want to meet up, that's the one. Call for K8CWS and we'll sort out where to find each other.

Booth of the day, hands down, was ARDC, Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ardc.net). ARDC stewards 44Net, the enormous block of IP address space set aside for amateur radio, and in 2019 they sold off a portion of it and turned the proceeds into a foundation that now funds grants, scholarships, and research across the entire hobby. The scale of what they're enabling is genuinely hard to overstate, and the people at the booth were as generous with their time as they are with their mission. If you don't know their story, go read it.

Logistics for today: we're holding off on arriving. The radar looks ominous and we've got heavy-ish rain in the forecast through late morning into the early afternoon, so we made the call to delay rather than slog through the worst of it. Plan is to be on-site around 12:30 or so, hopefully as it's tapering off. Once I'm in the door I'll be monitoring 145.250 simplex.

One thing I'm making sure not to miss: the AMSAT Forum at 2:30 in Forum Room #2. If you're into satellite work and want to say hi, that's a good place and time to catch me.

More updates as the day unfolds. 73 de Corbin, K8CWS

Four days out from Dayton Hamvention, and everything is coming together. Two quick bits of good news before the frequencies: I passed my Amateur Extra exam. Getting the upgrade done before Hamvention was something I really wanted to check off, and I made it with a few days to spare. The HAM-HQ shirts and ballcap are also with the embroiderer right now and will be done in time for the trip. So if you're looking for me on the floor, the logo gear is the play.

Now to the radio side. Here's where I'll be listening while I'm at Hamvention all three days. If you're there and want to meet up, drop me a call on any of these and we'll figure out where to find each other.

I'll have my radio scanning across these all weekend. If you hear K8CWS pop up, give me a shout. I'll also be posting live updates on the site with where I am and which frequency I'm actively monitoring at any given time, so check back if you want to coordinate in real time.

73, Corbin — K8CWS

Dayton Hamvention is one week away. I'll be at the Greene County Fairgrounds in Xenia all three days, May 15, 16, and 17. This is my first Dayton Hamvention, and I'm honestly more excited than I've been about anything ham-radio-related since I got my license.

If you want to put a face to a callsign, here's how to spot me: I'll be wearing a dark shirt or polo with the HAM-HQ logo on it, and a ballcap with the HAM-HQ logo on it. If you see me, please stop me and say hi. Putting faces to callsigns is half the reason I'm going. I want to meet the people who've been emailing me, requesting grids, sending feedback, and using the site.

I'll be posting on the site throughout the weekend with live updates on where I am, what I'm doing, and what frequency or repeater I'll be monitoring so we can coordinate meetups in real time. I haven't locked in the exact frequency yet (this is my first Hamvention!) but I'm working on it and I'll have those details nailed down before next Friday. Check back over the next several days for updates.

Even if we don't catch each other in person, find me on the site when you get home and say hi via the Contact page. I'd love to hear from anyone who spots me out in the wild.

73, Corbin — K8CWS

Three weeks since the last post, and the biggest item from the previous roadmap shipped: public accounts are live. They're optional, and they always will be. Guest mode is unchanged. If you do choose to sign up, everything you've saved locally rolls right into your account. Email verification, password reset, a captcha on the register form, an account management page, and a grid request form all came along with it. I wanted to get this right, and I'm proud of how it landed.

The other two items that were "in flight" last time both shipped, too. Six-character grid squares are now layered on top of the existing 4-character system. Your 4-char still drives the nav and the widgets that have always used it, and 6-char adds QTH precision on top for radar and satellite passes. The DX cluster is now live on the dashboard, scrolling spots in real time with speed control, country tags, and band coloring. A full /spots page followed with filtering, pin-to-top, and a country/prefix lookup.

One bonus that wasn't on the roadmap at all: POTA spots. Parks on the Air arrived as a sibling tab on the spots page with pinning and a worked marker, and it came together fast because the DX plumbing was already there. Which brings me to a question for you. The Toolbox on the dashboard still has a POTA tab from before this full-page tool existed. Now that there's a dedicated /spots POTA view, I'm honestly not sure the smaller Toolbox version is still earning its keep. If you've been using it, or if you'd miss it if it went away, I want to know. The Contact page is right there.

Nets got some love too: repeater details are now captured at submission time, the admin side has inline approve-and-edit, and there are two new regional batches on the site: EM98 (West Virginia) thanks to AB8RL, and EM69 (Indianapolis) thanks to N2FSM. Thank you both.

On the quieter side: the nav has a searchable grid combobox now, narrow phones get a hamburger drawer instead of wrapped tabs, and per-route SEO with a prerender pass means the site finally previews properly when you share a link on social media or it lands in a search result. Looking ahead: more Toolbox panels, dedicated digital mode tools, and a Frequencies page redesign that I'd really love feedback on. The current page is a wall of text and numbers and I want to do better. As always, the Contact page is the way to weigh in.

Hamvention is still right around the corner, and I'm still planning to be there. If you're attending and want to put a face to a callsign, find me.

73, Corbin — K8CWS

Ten days since my last post. In that time I have rebuilt the entire site from the ground up, added more features than I can keep track of, and started to realize that this thing has a community forming around it. I've been staring at a blinking cursor for twenty minutes trying to figure out how to organize all of this into something coherent. So here goes.

The biggest change is one you probably won't notice, and that's by design. Every page, every widget, every interactive element has been rewritten from scratch on a modern framework. The old site was hand-built HTML and JavaScript, which got me this far but was starting to buckle under the weight of everything I wanted to do next. Think of it like rebuilding a plane mid-flight: the passengers shouldn't feel a thing, but the cockpit is completely different now. It was terrifying, honestly. But the site is faster, more maintainable, and ready to grow in ways that weren't possible before.

The satellite page is brand new. The old embedded tracker from N2YO is gone, replaced with a custom-built map running right here on the site. You get a live ground track, your QTH plotted on the map, and Doppler-corrected uplink and downlink frequencies at AOS, TCA, and LOS for every pass. The pass prediction engine now runs entirely in your browser and is accurate to within seconds. Passes with a peak elevation of 40 degrees or higher get a visual highlight so you can spot the good ones at a glance. It works on mobile now, too, which it very much did not before.

The propagation dashboard got a visual overhaul that I'm really proud of. It has a bit of a command center feel to it now. Darker cards, subtle glow effects, smooth transitions. Cliff (N8VFK) emailed me suggesting a fullscreen mode, and I loved the idea so much that I had it built and live on the site within hours. Cliff runs Ham-HQ alongside HamClock on a multi-monitor setup in full screen, and knowing that someone is using the site that way is one of the coolest things I've heard since launching this project.

Bruce (KD9SNX) has been one of my most active and encouraging correspondents since he first reached out in late March. He asked if an HF band plan reference could live on the dashboard. That idea turned into the Toolbox, a five-tab reference panel sitting right on the main page with an HF Band Plan, Grid Locator, Azimuth calculator, Antenna reference, and RST guide, with more tools planned. You can drag and drop the tabs to reorder them however you want, and it remembers your layout. Bruce also flagged that the auto-assigned radar station wasn't great for his location on the western edge of his grid square, which directly led to the NEXRAD radar override that lets you pick your own station manually.

Chris (KM4BE) reached out on day one. Literally the first person to request a grid square through the contact form. Turns out he has a background in software. We first connected via radio, then over email and Discord. He's been helping curate net schedules and spreading the word. The nets admin page got a major upgrade with drag-and-drop reordering and a cleaner editing interface, partly because I knew someone other than me was going to be using it.

Behind the scenes, the server is now ingesting a live DX cluster feed. Real-time spot data is flowing in and being stored. You won't see this on the site yet. The plumbing is in place and the frontend integration is coming soon. When it lands, you'll be able to see what's being worked on each band in near real-time. I'm excited about this one.

The clock, net times, and satellite passes now automatically adjust to the timezone of whichever grid square you have selected. The contact form is now self-hosted, meaning I no longer rely on a third-party service to deliver your messages. And the site now has proper metadata for search engines and social media previews, which has already started bringing in new visitors.

Speaking of visitors: the grid list keeps growing. Almost every day someone new reaches out through the contact form asking for their grid to be added, and I love seeing where people are tuning in from. We're well past 26 grids now, covering areas from the DC metro to western New York to northeast California and beyond. If yours isn't on the list, you know what to do.

I want to take a moment to thank a few people directly. Bruce (KD9SNX), your feedback has shaped this site more than you probably realize. Every idea you've sent has either made it in already or is on the list, and your encouragement keeps me going. Chris (KM4BE), from a contact form message to a friend and collaborator in under two weeks. Your help with the nets, your willingness to test things, and your perspective as a fellow developer have been invaluable. Cliff (N8VFK), hearing that you run this site alongside HamClock was one of the most flattering things anyone has said to me about this project, and your fullscreen idea made the site better for everyone. And to everyone who has submitted a grid request, reported a bug, sent a kind word, or simply bookmarked the page: thank you. This started as a tool I built for myself. It's becoming something bigger, and that's because of all of you.

Looking ahead: six-character grid square support and user accounts are actively being planned. User accounts will not be required. You'll always be able to use the site exactly as you do now, as a guest, no sign-up needed. But if you choose to create an account, everything you've saved locally will roll right into it. Your scratchpad, station directory, NTS traffic, preferences, all of it. Nothing will be lost. I want to get this right, so it'll take some time, but it's coming.

Hamvention is right around the corner and I'm planning to be there. If you're attending and want to put a face to a callsign, find me. I'd love to meet you.

73, Corbin — K8CWS

A few people reached out this week with feedback and kind words, and I can't overstate how much that means to me. I'm one person building this in my spare time and I'm learning as I go. Knowing that people are out there actually using it, and taking the time to tell me about it, is so cool to me!

The NTS tool now handles both sides of a net, which I'm pretty excited about. The new receive tab checks your word count against the transmitted check in real time (green if it matches, red if it doesn't), keeps received traffic in its own separate log, and lets you download either log as a text file. It's been half a tool since day one. Not anymore!

The satellite tracker no longer has to ask N2YO for pass predictions, it just works them out right in your browser now. You get a full table of upcoming passes showing rise time, set time, max elevation, duration, and which direction it's crossing the sky, all tailored to your grid square. Much cleaner than what was there before.

The HF conditions status on the activity page got a detail drawer this week too. One click and you've got Kp, G-scale, solar wind speed, IMF Bz, radio blackout and radiation storm levels, and the last M or X-class flare on record, each with a plain-English read on what it actually means for propagation. I wrote those explanations for my own benefit as much as anything, honestly.

The Frequencies page picked up a VHF/UHF table covering FT8 on 6m, 2m, and 70cm, the national APRS frequency, the ISS digipeater, and standard 2m packet and Winlink entries. I also added a mode legend since "just tune to the dial frequency" means something different depending on whether you're running FT8 or PSK31.

The radar override came directly out of user feedback this week. It was pointed out that if you're on the western edge of your grid square, the auto-assigned station can be pretty useless for you. There's now a dropdown to pick a different NEXRAD station manually, and it'll stick so you don't have to mess with it again.

The local clock now shows the right time for whichever grid you have selected, not just whatever your browser thinks your timezone is. There's also a UTC/LOCAL toggle living under the new gear icon in the corner. You can switch it and everything follows, net times and satellite passes included. The gear consolidates the old theme toggle and the new time mode setting into one tidy spot.

We're up to 26 grid squares now, with more coming in as people request them. If your area isn't on the list yet, the contact page is right there!

73 de K8CWS

Five days is not a long time. It's also apparently enough time to build several things and feel the itch to write about them.

The biggest addition is the grid square selector. The site now has a global control that lets you set your grid square, and the widgets that depend on location — the local nets schedule, the NOAA radar, the satellite tracker — all update to match. It sounds small. It doesn't feel small. The site went from being quietly centered on Columbus to being useful to anyone who pulls it up. Fair warning: the nets list is currently curated for Columbus, OH only. I'll be filling it out for other areas over the coming week.

There's also a theme toggle now. Dark mode has been the default since day one, and it's staying that way, but if you prefer a lighter look you've got it.

The Frequencies and Links pages both got meaningful overhauls. They're better now.

The rest has been polish — the kind of work that doesn't announce itself but makes everything feel a little more intentional. More of that is coming, along with bigger things I'll write about when they're ready.

73, Corbin — K8CWS

I keep waiting for the part where it stops feeling surreal.

A week ago, Ham-HQ was a Notepad document and a half-formed idea. Tonight it's a live site with ten pages, a working NTS traffic tool, real-time propagation data, satellite tracking, and more features than I originally thought I'd ever build. I still can't fully account for how that happened.

Some context: I took web design in high school and it was genuinely one of those things that just clicked for me immediately. I got into CSS, picked up some JavaScript, designed whole pages from scratch. But I never had anything live on the internet — and I walked away from it. Video production became my thing for a while, and web stuff quietly moved to the back burner where it sat for the better part of twenty years.

So in one sense, this felt familiar. In another, it was completely unrecognizable. The tooling, the deployment, the idea of a server returning live data to a browser — none of that was in my frame of reference. What made it possible was building with AI as a collaborator. I could articulate what I wanted, work through what I didn't know, and build things I wouldn't have touched otherwise. It was humbling in the best way: I realized fast how much I didn't know, and equally fast that I could still build it anyway.

What is Ham-HQ, exactly? I'm still working that out. It started as a tool — a personal dashboard because I was tired of having twelve tabs open to do one thing at the radio. It grew into a project. Now I think it might also be something like a love letter to this hobby.

I got licensed not long ago. No family in ham radio, and I stumbled into it mostly on my own — though if I'm being honest, I have the tinkering gene, and ham radio is a tinkerer's hobby, so I was probably always going to end up here eventually. I learned through Google and YouTube and club members who were gracious with their time and knowledge. And I kept running into the same friction: information was everywhere but organized for nobody. You had to already know where to look.

(I do have an Elmer now — N8MH, and he's fantastic. He's a family friend I've known my whole life, though we only saw each other on vacations growing up. I always knew he was into radio. He was the first person I thought to reach out to once I got licensed and realized I was going to dive headlong into this. He just happened to be a few states away in North Carolina — but that's what radios are for.)

If Ham-HQ is anything, it's an argument that newcomers belong here. That you don't have to wait until you're an Extra with forty years in the hobby to build something useful for the community. The bands don't care how long you've been licensed.

More features are coming. Feedback is welcome. And if you're using this site, thank you — that alone makes it worth it.

73, Corbin — K8CWS

Nobody handed me ham radio. I found it, which I think is a different experience than most people have.

No family in the hobby. I learned everything the way a lot of people learn things now: one forum thread at a time, one YouTube video at a time, one patient answer from a club member who was generous with their time and knowledge. It worked. But it was slow, and the information was scattered across a dozen places that didn't know about each other.

I started keeping a master document. A Google Doc, basically. Links here, frequencies there, net schedules over there. My own personal organization layer on top of a hobby that has genuinely great resources — they're just not in one place.

Around the same time, I started getting into NTS traffic nets through my club. The National Traffic System. You show up on frequency, you pass radiograms. Old school structured messaging by voice, and I loved it immediately. I was practicing by copying traffic straight into Notepad, which worked fine until I thought: I should build a small tool for this. Just for me, on my home PC.

It wasn't a long leap from there to realizing the tool belonged with the master document — and that the master document was probably better as a dashboard.

It took me about a day to build the first version. Then I thought it deserved a real server so I could use it from anywhere — not just my shack PC. I spun up a cheap VPS, bought a domain, and pointed it at the thing I'd built.

Ham-HQ was born on a Sunday night because I had an itch I couldn't stop scratching.

Within about a week it had grown into something I didn't plan. More pages, more tools, live data, an actual navigation structure. I didn't set out to build a site. I set out to stop juggling browser tabs. But somewhere between "this is useful for me" and "maybe this is useful for other people too," it turned into something worth publishing.

Here we are.

73, Corbin — K8CWS