Salty Walt Goes “Next Level” with New Portable Antenna Sketchbook

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For many hams, portable operating starts simply: a wire in a tree, a folding chair, and the lure of making memorable contacts from a favourite spot. For Walt Hudson, K4OGO — better known to many as “Salty Walt” from YouTube’s Coastal Waves & Wires — that spirit of the outdoors has always been the point.

Now Walt is back with a second collection of antenna projects, Salty Walt’s Next Level Portable Antenna Sketchbook, expanding on the easygoing, field-tested style that made his first book a favourite among radio amateurs.

Where Salty Walt's Portable Antenna Sketchbook focused on beachside builds and creative wire antennas, the new volume ventures into even more concepts while keeping the design approachable. Readers will still find practical, deployable antennas designed for parks, beaches, and backyard operating, but this time Walt explores ideas like phased arrays, beam-forming, and higher-gain directional arrays — all presented in his familiar notebook-sketch style.

“Designing, building, improving, and learning about antennas never ends — it evolves. This book is meant to take antenna building to the NEXT LEVEL.”
— Walt Hudson, K4OGO

The 17 projects range from relatively simple builds, such as a three-element vertical Yagi-Uda and half-square antenna, to more sophisticated designs including portable rhombics, bobtail curtains, and co-phased vertical arrays.

Throughout the book, Walt keeps the emphasis on learning by doing, with the same entertaining teaching style and relaxed voice that fans have come to expect.

“I referred to my first book as the Jimmy Buffett of antenna books,. Well, this is the second album, where the songs are only getting better.”
— Walt Hudson, K4OGO

Alongside the antenna projects, Walt shares radios from his personal collection and operating tips to help amateurs get the most from their stations, whether running QRP or operating at 100 watts. The book also explores military-inspired antenna systems and streamlined wire antenna designs that can be deployed with minimal equipment. The result feels less like a technical manual and more like riding along on another operating adventure.

ARRL Bookshop - https://home.arrl.org/action/Store/Product-Details/productId/2094335552

Morse Code Used as Part of a Hack to Steal $200,000 Worth of Cryptocurrency

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An X user managed to trick AI chatbot Grok into sending around $200,000 worth of crypto after exploiting its link with an automated trading bot. The incident involved Grok and ‘Bankrbot’, two AI systems with wallet access, which were manipulated into executing a transaction on the Base network.

The attacker received 3 billion DRB tokens, valued at roughly $200,000 at the time, after sending a hidden instruction written in Morse code that bypassed safeguards and triggered the transfer. The exploit was carried out by an X user, who later deleted their account after completing the transaction.

Media Story - https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/x-user-tricks-grok-into-sending-them-200000-in-crypto-using-morse-code-3361036/?utm_source=amateur-radio-weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

Students are ‘Over The Moon’

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Students are ‘Over The Moon’

The moon missions of the 1960s were most certainly awe-inspiring, but for those of us who were perhaps young students here on Earth at the time, they were as distant an experience to us as the moon itself. Not so with Artemis II: With eight universities chosen by NASA to track the Orion spacecraft via radio, the moon became a close and almost palpable presence for the young.

Yes, tracking a moon mission can be a personal experience - as many students on several university campuses discovered. In Pennsylvania, Sawyer Mervis and Jake Wendt were up on a campus rooftop in the early morning hours with a parabolic antenna and other student-built equipment. They were collecting data for the US space agency NASA from the 248,655-mile flight around the moon. The receiving station had been a team project, with the Panther Amateur Radio Club at the University of Pittsburgh receiving guidance and support from faculty in various engineering departments.  

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