[K3CAL] Equipment and Reading Recommendations

[Franklin Charity]

Dwight,

I’m a new ham myself so I don’t really have the experience with ham radio. But with my profession I have experience with SDRs. I used to do the wireless hacking village at all the security conferences and learned how to fox hunt with the hackrf and RTLSDR.  A really good book to learn a lot of that is Practical SDR, it’s a no starch press book and I cannot recommend their books more for anything technical.   There is a video course too by Michael Ossman that you can find on YouTube that teaches the fundamentals of using the hackRF.  It’s a little outdated but still worth a watch.   And you can use any SDR with the course doesn’t have to be the HackRF.  

I can’t give much advice on your setup as I’m setting up my shack still myself and trying to figure that out and figure out what my niche is.  But the safety stuff and trying to figure out what I want to do now is the advice I was given when starting out.  Get the basics down then build from there.  

Something as a beginner I’m curious about with your setup is, is there a reason you have a dedicated 10 m radio and the ICOM 7300? Is there a benefit to that or is it being used for a specific purpose? 




Sent from my iPhone. Any mistakes made is because Siri made me do it. 

> On May 16, 2026, at 5:23 PM, Shawn Donley via K3CAL <k3cal at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> A good book on grounding and bonding like https://home.arrl.org/action/Store/Product-Details/productId/133989 and some grounding and bonding supplies from a source like kf7p.com
>  
> Best defense against lightning damage is to disconnect the coax and leave it outside.  Can protect the coax and connector by sliding into an empty wine bottle laying horizontally on the ground (enjoy the wine first).  Not always practical or convenient.  Otherwise, protect against transients by using a good arrestor at the coax entry point to the house along with a couple of 8 ft ground rods spaced about 12 ft apart.  Those ground rods should be bonded to you house ground at the service entry panel using a minimum of #6 wire.  It's all explained in the book above.  But realize you can't expect your gear to survive a direct strike unless both the feedline, power and any network cables are disconnected.  The pros follow guidance found in  Motorola R56 (Google it for a download).  Impractical and uneconomical for 99% of amateur radio ops.
>> On 05/16/2026 4:00 AM EDT Dwight Gordon via K3CAL <k3cal at mailman.qth.net> wrote:
>>  
>>  
>> Good morning,
>>           Attached to this email is a list of equipment I currently have on hand. Hoping to get some recommendations on literature or essentials to fill gaps in my shack. Thanks for your time. 
>>  
>> KD3CZT
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