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