Radio Nerd Shenanigans by Anika H. '26

*the footnotes are my current self doing commentary* :p

“hey, I’m stealing free food from florey again. do you guys want anything? KN6OQK”

“i wann chimken”

“what do they have? KC1RQI”

“rice? soop of some sort, i kinda forgot”

“could i get some food? KC1REV”

“lol sure. KN6OQK”

how I got here

I picked up ham radio as a hobby during quarantine. It started with a regular Wikipedia rabbit hole, but out of extreme boredom and morbid curiosity, I downloaded and read through a 400 page radio manual. I took the test, got my license, and joined a local ARES⁠01 stands for Amateur Radio Emergency Services. I still miss them a bit. for fun.

When I was in high school, everyone I met in ham radio was either old, white, or a man, and often a combination of all three.

They told me that radio was slowly dying out.  Back in ye olde days⁠02 some people in Radio Society are probably immortal , everybody had a radio. they would order pizza on the beach over radio and talk to each other on air while driving (probably not a very safe practice). After phones and the internet became a thing, radios fell out of fashion.

tetazoo

I thought the ham population would be small here, but about half a month after hanging out on Tetazoo, I discover that nearly half of the entire hall have radios. On top of the unexpected diversity,  I was shocked to find we also have our own frequency, affectionately named “Dumbass Brigade”. When Josh first programmed the frequency into my radio, I was happy about something radio related for the first time since I accidentally deleted my saved channels over the summer. I ended up spending 2 hours discussing aliens and meowing⁠03 humans generally meow more than cats over radio with 7-ish other people on hall.

“Commencing meowing sequence in T minus 10 seconds–”

“You forgot to ID.”

“Alpha-Mike-0-Golf-Uniform-Sierra” (AMOGUS)

“Pretty sure you need to give your real call sign”

“That’s totally a real call sign, what are you talking about? ”

sus

first impressions

I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get to the club room. Walker wasn’t the most enjoyable building to navigate, especially due to the long flights of stairs and well-hidden, rickety elevators as an alternative⁠04 the building's gotten easier to navigate, but the elevator still sucks . Tired from climbing stairs and slightly hungry, I walk into the club room to see a group of sketchy looking people huddled around a small table eating pizza. The waterfall display was flowing on a radio on a table surrounded by another pile of radios and oscilloscopes. I had never seen such an elaborate setup before, and was internally freaking out about the number of high-tech radios casually sitting on another old desk, old QSTs⁠05 ham radio magazine issues. they used to be bound like chapter books, and the older ones were literally falling apart by the seams going all the way back to the 1920s, and the stacks and stacks of QSL⁠06 when ham radio operators make a contact, we try and send each other qsl cards, which are essentially post cards with our call signs on it. it's like a little souvenir that says 'i got someone from the other side of the globe!' or 'i talked to my next door neighbor on radio', and whatever applies in between cards spilling towards the door. All the meanwhile, there were two visibly annoyed guys⁠07 deesh and hans  cleaning up a pile of electronics that filled up an uncomfortably large percentage of the room.

One thing you must know about Radio Society, is that we are perpetually messy. Hans has been trying very hard to clean up the place for the past few weeks. It never works permanently. Every once in a while, somebody tries to clear up the space but it eventually gets filled with stuff just like it was before. And just when the room is about to explode from the amount of bookshelves, filing cabinets, radios, parts, and machinery, another person comes along and tries to clean the room. It’s a delicate balance that has yet to be broken for the past century of the club’s existence. While we sometimes have issues finding stuff with all the reorganization that’s happening, most people have been enjoying the newly created space and putting it to good use.

the local frosh population

Besides me, there are other frosh that consistently come to Triple Foxtrot. Eating pizza and listening to old guys talk about their health problems on HF is always fun, but after finishing our plates, we’ve spent a lot of our time messing around with Tesla Coils.

1. Assembly – most of this part was done by Shreya. She helped solder the structure for the top load, the circuit (with a heat sink), and the primary outside the prewound secondary coil.
2. Testing – basically, you take a screwdriver, ground a finger on the base of the metal part, and then you go zap zap with some small arcs. For context, the Tesla Coil stands about two feet tall and makes bright purple arcs about an inch long.
3. Lights – we tried bringing lightbulbs close to the coil and they glowed without touching anything.
4. Annoy the other radio guys – because of the massive electric field the coil was producing, we were causing a bunch of interference⁠08 we found out later that the tesla coil wasn't the cause, but it was pretty funny in the moment lol on HF and Hans couldn’t operate properly while we had it on.
5. SMORES – after thoroughly washing a screwdriver and a needle-nose plier, we stuck marshmallows onto the end and brought it close enough to create more arcs. Llie and Arthur’s brilliant idea somehow worked, and the marshmallows melted nicely onto a paper plate, from which we picked them up and ate them. Unlike your regular smore, these were reverse marshmallows which were soft on the outside and crispy on the inside where the marshmallow touched the metal. 10/10 would eat again.
   

   hans gets ignored for marshmallows

artistic terrorization

I forgot how exactly people realized I could draw, but I’ve started doing a lot of art since coming to Radio Society. I started out using my skills for good. Hans wanted to print the current W1MX logo on a PCB, but the best he could get was a photo of the text on a QSL card. The current “logo” was just the W1XM in serif font, and on top of that, the curvature in the picture taken made it look like some sort of captcha. I offered to help with the revamping, and after some iterations on the back of a Swapfest poster⁠09 swapfest posters get used for everything. Other than advertisement, it gets used as scratch paper, insulation, temporary signage, structural integrity for a mini slayer exciter I built, etc etc. , I rendered something that I think looked decent.

W1XM (UHF Repeater Association, not to be confused with W1MX Radio Society) logo with similar design elements because I think it looks cooler and totally not because I mixed up the two call signs

But someone complained that it wasn’t readable, suggesting I put triangles in the black and white spaces in the “W”,”X”, and “M”. Other than completely ruining the design element, it kind of defeats the purpose of a new logo to add a bit more personality (it looked like regular serif). So since I couldn’t change it, I made alternatives. In fact I think they’re even better⁠10 i am proud to say that after a semester, the amogus logo gets used and drawn regularly on whiteboards. than the first logo I made.

radome crashing through the green building

amogus

gif it was based on

roach antenna

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The PCBs ended up being printed with the captcha.

Soon, I started to gain a reputation for making various cursed drawings on the whiteboards. Aside from doodling amogi everywhere, I started making anime versions of all the Radio Society members. I produced a beautiful rendition of Daniel as a magical girl after he drew a gradient vector on the tail of my cat doodle. Mitch’s⁠11 ive also drawn mitch a few times, much to his annoyance. he doesn't really like being anime-ified eyebrows seemed to do some weird acrobatics for a good two minutes after seeing the picture.

On behalf of some anonymous members, Hans requested a full rendering of anime Deesh, arguably the most sus-looking person in Radio Society. I’ve specifically been requested to include the beret, the copper wire key-ring, and a kilt. It was a joy to draw and has since then been hung up on the wall.

second impressions

Some people here bicker a lot, though some tend to claim otherwise. They debate everything from the writing of the club constitution to matters as trivial as the pros and cons of Discord. In fact, as I type this⁠12 some time in October 2022 lol , their conversation transitioned from an argument about data privacy to the extraction of horse teeth. It gets a little chaotic sometimes, but I find the conversations entertaining. The signal chat is always active, and people are always talking with each other. On the other hand, more times than I’d like to admit, I can’t understand half the vocabulary they use. Not sure if it’s just EE grad student word vomit or HF techy things I haven’t learned, but I’m hoping⁠13 anika, you absolute clown more of this will come to me⁠14 i have picked up a lot since the beginning of the last semester, and i know roughly how to kinda use the station maybe, and i have some basic concepts, but i still feel far from being able to engage in regular conversation about the aforementioned techy things with the rest of them. the good thing is, everyone in the club is happy to teach as long as you ask questions. i made progress, but i have a ways to go. as I gain more experience in the station.

the station