illustration of the a strutless dyadic partitioning of the unit squareGreg Maxwell / Radio


I am an extra class amateur radio operator with callsign NT4TN (as the domain name says).

Decades ago when I ran communications for a municipality in Florida I worked with amateur radio operators in the context of disaster recover and preparedness. I was impressed by the ability of radio to communicate across long distances with either minimal infrastructure (which could be easily replaced if destroyed) or no infrastructure at all.

Of late, I've mostly been interested in communicating by bouncing signals off the ionization trails left by meteors (image of some contacts I've had on the 2 meter band) and other weak signal propagation modes.

I also enjoy racking up contacts all over the world, communicating without any intermediaries via ionospheric skip and collecting operating awards. I've communicated with over seven thousand other stations across 173 DXCC entities (a country or isolated geography).

The furthest contact I've made— at a distance of close to 12,000 miles— is the Crozet Islands, a sub-Antarctic archipelago which is uninhabited except for the dozen or so researchers stationed there and an uncountable number of penguins.