HOME SHACK
Fixed station. Full power, full bands, and the wire that takes itself seriously.
- RIG
- Icom IC-7300
- PWR
- 100W HF
- ANT
- Hustler 5-BTV vertical
//AMATEUR RADIO
parks on the air · portable HF · digital first, SSB always
// THE MOBILE SHACK
Xiegu G90 in a custom-designed faceplate, mounted in the Ranger. Center console becomes a portable HF station — drive to a park and get on the air. Plenty of contacts from random parking lots.
KF8EJM · licensed amateur radio operator
General class. Based in Hazel Park, Michigan (grid EN82). Most of my air time is HF digital — FT8 is the daily mode and CW practice on the side. Parks on the Air motivates me to get out and take the long way home on trips.
Find me on the air or look me up: pota.app/KF8EJM and qrz.com/KF8EJM.
- MODES
- FT8 · SSB · CW ●
- BANDS
- 80m – 6m, You can usually find me on 20m FT8
- OPS
- home · mobile · backpack · POTA
- GRID
- EN82 when home. Lately changes often.
01.// stations
Three configurations, picked by the kind of day it is.
MOBILE SHACK
G90 in the Ranger. Default config keeps a 20m Ham stick on the mount — FT8 from anywhere I can park.
- RIG
- Xiegu G90
- PWR
- 20W HF
- ANT
- Ham sticks · 20m default
BACKPACK STATION
Full-portable go-kit. Pack holds rig plus battery — walk in, deploy a wire, you're a station.
- RIG
- IC-7300, G90, tr(uSDX)
- BATT
- 20Ah LiFePO4
- ANT
- 20m and 40m spooltennas · JPC-7 with mods (ground spike, 18' masts)· Various EFHVs
02.// antennas
Different problems, different wire. The Ham sticks work great until they don't — then a bigger antenna comes out of the bag.
REF
ANTENNA
BANDS
NOTES
ANT-01
Hustler 5-BTV
80 · 40 · 20 · 15 · 10m
home · ground-mounted trapped vertical · daily driver at the QTH
ANT-02
Ham Sticks · ×5
80 · 40 · 20 · 15 · 10m
mobile · single-band swappable on the custom built Ranger mount ·20m is the DEFAULT
ANT-03
Spooltenna · 20m (DIY)
20m
Great for POTA · Rolls up small · deploys fast
ANT-04
Spooltenna · 40m (DIY)
40m
Great for POTA · Rolls up small · deploys fast · 40m takes over when the grey line is here
ANT-05
JPC-7
multi-band portable
POTA · when a stick isn't enough antenna for the propagation
03.// digital & GPS
FT8 is the daily mode. WSJT-X on the Lenovo T480 (Arch Linux, of course) does the heavy lifting — GridTracker2 is a must for tracking and logging. JS8Call is a curiosity and I have jumped in a few times. Not a regular thing.
For portable, the laptop has hotspot when available. Sometimes thats just not possible. Like Death Valley. so I wrote a small Python app that polls a USB GPS dongle and sets the system clock from $GPRMC, calculates the Maidenhead grid from the fix, updates the clock with chrony and sends the UDS packet for grid to WSJT-X. By the time the radio is warm, the clock is right and the grid is set. No fiddling — just deploy and operate or drive and stay correct.
04.// pota awards · 2026
DX Hunter
Confirmed contacts with parks in five different DX entities. Long-haul propagation putting in the work.
Arizona Agave
100 unique POTA reference areas worked as a hunter. The first triple-digit hunter milestone in the books.
Silver Activator
20 unique reference areas activated — not just worked. Each one a setup, a CQ POTA, and a logbook full of contacts.
Rover Warthog
Five POTA entities activated inside a single UTC day — US-9425, US-9432, US-9486, US-1944, US-0483. A roving day with no idle time.
Support Your Parks · Spring 2026
Hunter award for the April 18–19 UTC weekend event. A whole weekend of working activators across the program.