Military Radio Field Day 2025 FTX
“Military Radio” Field Day 2025 was another Field Training Exercise that I did on Mt Diablo, CA. As usual, I operated only military radio equipment in this national emergency communications […]
Winter Field Day 2025
UPDATE: 3/5/25. The following After Action Report for Winter Field Day 2025 is posted in an effort to encourage grid-down emergency communications exercises with rugged, reliable equipment.. Why? Communications infrastructure […]
Portable Field Antenna Kit
UPDATED 12/18/2025 “Executive Summary” The Question: What do you want your portable field antenna to DO? Validate a Model? Impress a Professor? Increase your experience? Make contacts? Have fun? The […]
AN/GRC-109 “Special Forces” Radio Set
UPDATED 12/22/2025: My favorite “Black Radio”. The AN/GRC-109 Special Forces Radio Set, AKA the “GRC-109” and “ANGRY 109”. Probably the ultimate “SHTF Radio” for trained (or trainable) personnel. The GRC-109 […]
End Fed Half Wave Wire Antennas
Updated: 6/9/2025 – A work in progress. End Fed Half Wave wire antennas must be great. Everyone is selling them! Meh. The antenna engineer’s axiom: You can have high gain, […]
PRC-174 HF Manpack Radio Set
UPDATE: 7/31/2025 I recently obtained a veteran RT-936/PRC-174 HF manpack radio from a fellow Ham (Thanks!). These were made by Tadiran from a design clearly originating from Hughes Aircraft, makers […]
Mil Radio Ops at FOB COVID 2020
July 2020: The following is a brief After Action Report on Military Radio training operations at Forward Operating Base COVID, July 2020. Scheduling difficulties required delaying from the June 2020 […]
Military Radios @ ARRL Field Day 2024
ARRL Field Day 2024: In an effort to encourage more off-grid, portable field radio operation and exercises the following After Action Report is posted: I used some of my usual […]
TRC-77A HF CW Transceiver
UPDATED 12/12/2025 A friend recently gave me an RT-654A/TRC-77. Also known as the TRC-77A. The RT-654(*) is the basic component of the “AN/TRC-77 HF CW Transceiver” set. I am pretty […]
A Communications Forward Operating Base
Updated 4/29/2025: Members of the West Coast Military Radio Collectors Group deployed a Communications Forward Operating Base at MVCC Camp Plymouth for the April 2025 event. The intent was to […]