My Radio Journal
Where I tell the stories behind the signals.
It’s a mix of amateur radio adventures, lessons learned, equipment discoveries, emergency communications, DMR and APRS, Coast Guard memories, and the occasional strange or funny moment that comes with a lifetime around radios. Some entries are practical, some are personal, and some are simply stories worth telling—but they all come back to the same idea: radio is ultimately about people, communication, and the connections we make along the way.
The Phone Patch That Saved a Life
A Coast Guard helicopter was on scene, but the crew could not find the man in the water among the many boats and other objects in the bay. Then I remembered an old idea from ham radio that connected the eyewitness directly to the aircrew.
More Than a Dot on a Map: My Journey into APRS
APRS is much more than location tracking. From my 17th-floor apartment in Brooklyn to field tests around Coney Island, I’ve been exploring how radios, GPS, iGates, DMR, messaging and plenty of troubleshooting come together—one packet at a time.
Where’s Waldo? Building an Incident Command System in Coney Island
In July 2017, I created and led the Coney Island SAREX, a large-scale CERT exercise built around a simulated search for a missing vulnerable senior. With nearly one hundred participants, multiple radio nets, a formal Incident Command structure, medical support, and my stepfather playing “Waldo,” the exercise turned FEMA classroom concepts into practical experience. It was hot, complicated, occasionally funny, and a powerful lesson in why ICS has to be practiced—not merely studied.
These journal entries are written with assistance from ChatGPT.
The thoughts, experiences, and final editorial choices are my own.