Project writeups, build logs, and things I figured out along the way. I describe what I want, Claude writes the code, and I document what happened.
The QMX+ has been in the field before. This was the first activation with the ATU-10 tuner — and the bench debugging session with Claude Code that made it work.
Activated William W. Powers State Recreation Area (US-4107) on 40m CW. The park sits on a decommissioned Nike Ajax missile site from the Cold War. 21 QSOs, W9JOM booming in from a few miles out, and my son fishing from a canoe on Wolf Lake.
CESSB gives you 3-4 dB more average power on SSB at the same peak envelope power. No commercial portable HF radio implements it internally. Adding it to the X6100 means Ghidra, STM32 assembly, code cave injection, and working through a closed OEM firmware with no symbols and no source.
Nine months after the idea, POTASpotter shipped for Hamvention. Two spotting paths in the same firmware dialog: WiFi posts directly to the POTA API, JS8Call over RF lets any gateway station relay your spot to pota.app. No phone required at the operating position.
A POTA feature crashed eight times. The ninth fix was deleting 261 lines.
I built a pipeline that records every transmission on AllStar node 604010, transcribes it with Whisper, identifies speakers with PyAnnote voice embeddings, decodes MDC1200 PTT IDs, and displays everything in a web chat UI. Six weeks from idea to production.
I have a Xiegu X6100. The stock firmware is missing things. I started researching the r1cbu custom firmware community, figured out where the project went after r1cbu stepped back, and landed on an idea: POTA self-spotting via JS8Call directly from the radio, no phone required.
Moved from Windows 11 to KDE Plasma. iaxRPT works fine under Wine. The AnyTone BP-02 Bluetooth PTT button did not -- the library it used was dead on Linux. This is how I fixed it.