Earlier this week, the Dayton Hamvention announced its 2026 award winners. This year’s Technical Achievement Award winner is Bob Famiglio, K3RF. It’s hard to argue with this choice. As the Hamvention press release points out….

I found this post on reddit yesterday, and I loved the idea so much that I have volunteered to be the unofficial PR guy for this project. Say what you will about MFJ projects—and I have sometimes been critical myself about them—Martin and his company have played a big part in amateur radio for a long time. This is a story that should be told. 

When I first started publishing my , there were really only three of us producing amateur radio license study guides: the ARRL, Gordon West, and me. Now, there are many more. If you do a search on Amazon for “Technician Class license study guide,” you’ll see that there are at least a dozen other study guides out there.

Even though I am now retired, I am still a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and subscribe to their Career Alert newsletter. The latest issue features a short article from Rahul Pandey, founder of Taro, a platform for helping software engineers manage their careers. The article is about asking better questions to get the help you need in order to do your job better.

I’m not a big FT-8 user, but what shack computer would be complete without an installation of WSJT-X? So, last night I installed the program. After selecting the correct audio input, I was seeing and decoding FT-8 signals on 20 meters.

Yesterday, the first program that I attempted to install on my Linux Mint computer was Not1MM. As reported in the comments section of Part 2, Not1MM doesn’t seem to want to run on this computer. It installs just fine, but when I try to run it, I get the error message, “Incompatible processor. The Qt build requires the following features: sse4.2 popcnt.”

As part of my effort to get QLog running the way I wanted on my Linux Mint computer, I asked for help on Mastodon. There, someone suggested that I might want to run the Andy’s Ham Radio Linux (AHRL) script to install a bunch of ham radio software in one swell foop. That sounded like a good idea, so I gave it a go.

As you may know, Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025. This means that it will no longer provide technical assistance, feature updates or security updates. This has prompted me to bite the bullet and convert the Windows box I use in my shack to Linux.