How to Redirect HamClock to OHB - and Also Understand HamClock's SDO, Solar Wind, and Solar Flux Info

(No, this is not an April Fool's Day bit!)

Here's some great follow up videos to my March 25 post about some of HamClock's radio propagation features.  These videos cover both  HamClock's SDO, Solar Wind and Solar Flux information as wella s how to redirect your HamClock's backend to OHB in general.  

These videos are courtesy of the open source Open Backend (OHB) project, the open source successor to Clear Sky Institute (CSI), the originator of HamClock.  (CSI's backend was shut down due to the unfortunate January 2026 passing of the pioneering  of its original creator, Elwood Downey, WB0OEW.   Note that "backend" refers to the engine that gathers all the changing data that HamClock uses and presents.)

Video 1

Confused about how to redirect your HamClock to the OHB backend in the first place?  Check this out:

Video 2

Radio Operator's "Forbidden" German Impersonation Saved 300

The cold in the Ardennes didn’t feel like weather that night. It felt like intent.

It cut through wool, through canvas, through gloves already stiff with old mud and frozen sweat. Snow drifted through the black fir trees in long ghostly sheets, softening the earth while hardening everything that breathed on it. Men slept in foxholes because exhaustion was stronger than fear for a few hours at a time. They slept curled in mud, under damp blankets, beside rifles gone numb with frost, while somewhere out in the dark the war kept moving.

Corporal Eddie Voss was not sleeping.

He sat in a narrow foxhole east of Bastogne with a headset pressed hard against his ears, listening to the enemy breathe through static.

Before the war, Eddie had worked on electrical systems in Milwaukee. He was the kind of man who could hear trouble before anyone else could see it. A transformer didn’t just fail to him. It warned. A line under strain carried a different hum. A damaged switch gave itself away in tiny irregular clicks. He had built his life on paying attention longer than other people did.

Then the Army discovered he spoke German.

Not school German. Not phrasebook German. The real thing. The language of his immigrant parents, the language of kitchen arguments and whispered family grief after Pearl Harbor made every German word feel dangerous in public. So the Army handed him a radio and pushed him into war.

He was twenty-one years old and freezing in Belgium.

And for four nights in a row, he had been doing something he absolutely was not supposed to be doing.

Listening to enemy transmissions.

At first it was curiosity. That’s what he told himself. The front was chaos anyway. Units were cut off. Orders arrived late or garbled. Weather swallowed radio traffic and spit back static. In that kind of confusion, the enemy sounded less like a mystery than another piece of the weather. So Eddie tuned around, using a captured German set and a pair of seized headphones, and began listening to voices in the dark.

What started as boredom turned into pattern.

One German officer always cleared his throat before disagreeing.

Another clipped his consonants too sharply to be from the south.

A logistics man sounded bored no matter how desperate the message.

And one commander — the one Eddie heard most often — had the deep smoker’s rasp of a man who had been shouting over engines for years.

Eddie gave him a name.

Run Silent, Run Deep

The USS Massachusetts, the Navy's newest Virginia-class fast attack submarine, was commissioned this past Saturday (March 28) in South Boston.  The new nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN-798), is the first submarine named after the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the eighth Navy vessel to bear the name. 

Historically, the name has been carried by eight other vessels including two battleships:

USS Massachusetts (BB-59): A South Dakota-class fast battleship commissioned in 1942, which served extensively in World War II (including the invasions of North Africa, the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, and the Battle of Okinawa) before being decommissioned in 1947.  Since 1965, it has been preserved as a museum ship at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Massachusetts, since 1965. 

USS Massachusetts (BB-2): An Indiana-class pre-dreadnought battleship commissioned in 1896 that served in the Spanish–American War and World War I before being renamed Coast Battleship Number 2 and scuttled off Pensacola, Florida, in 1921, where its wreck now serves as an artificial reef and diving spot. 

The current SSN-798, built by Newport News Shipbuilding, is a 377-foot-long vessel with a displacement of 7,800 tons and a complement of 135 crew members, featuring advanced stealth, surveillance, and special warfare capabilities.

Look closely, because this may be the last time you're able to see her.

Godspeed to the USS Massachusetts and her crew.

The Radio Geek’s Doomscrolling Antidote

Immerse yourself in a digital collection of amateur radio and communication artifacts

The internet has aged to the point where it is easy to fall into a rabbit hole, reminiscing about websites from decades past.

The site that fuels those scrolling endeavors is the Internet Archive — a nonprofit that hosts a digital library of internet sites and other artifacts in digital form. The project began in 1996 to archive the web.

Today, it contains one trillion web pages through its “Wayback Machine,” as well as 56 million books and texts. It also works with approximately 1,400 libraries through its Archive-It program to identify and preserve important digital history.

Kay Savetz (K6KJN) freely admits to having been an Internet Archive power user. Savetz used not just the archive.org website, but also its command line interface to upload many documents. 

A licensed amateur radio operator since 1989, Savetz’s own interviews with Atari 8-bit computer pioneers are among those early uploads.  So when the Amateur Radio Digital Communications foundation provided a significant grant to the Internet Archive to form a collection of the history of amateur radio and adjacent endeavors, the archive sought a lead curator. Savetz was a natural fit. 

The project was funded in 2022 and titled the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Today, DLARC has approximately 225,000 items, spanning magazines, newsletters and call books.

In computing terms, that’s about 26 terabytes of storage space, Savetz told us.

All you need is time.

Click this link to peruse the collection — and you’ll probably all of a sudden wonder where an hour of your day went. From QSL cards to logbooks to newsletters to even lectures on DX and related topics.

DLARC is a haven for radio amateurs, but also shortwave enthusiasts, long-distance radio reception clubs, early communication pioneers and more recently, college and community radio. 

Full runs of 73 Magazine are available, as well as early public-domain QST issues. There are also Aviation and Wireless magazines that date back to the early 1900s.

“We have Radio News from the early part of the 1900s, from back in the day when the hot new things were airplanes and radios,” Savetz said.

The items go beyond paper, as Savetz has helped digitize 35mm slides, reel-to-reel tapes, 16mm film, U-matic, Beta and various floppy disk formats. 

One of the approximately 150 searchable callbooks that are part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications.

Sixty Pounds to the Summit!

On CW Worldwide CW weekend, Jason Goldsberry began his station setup with a hike.

The path climbs through dusty bike trails and scrubland on the edge of Santiago, Chile. The city sprawls out below him—glass towers, apartment blocks, and the distant haze of one of South America’s largest urban centers. In his hands and on his back is everything required to operate in one of amateur radio’s most competitive global contests.

Radios. Batteries. Antennas. Masts. Laptop. Cables.

All of it carried in by hand.

In total, the load weighs about sixty pounds.

It takes two trips from the car to move the entire station into position. First the antenna gear and lighter equipment. Then the heavier items: batteries and a massive sun umbrella that will double as shade and operating shelter. After twenty minutes of hiking and another thirty minutes of setup, the portable contest station comes to life.

A Yaesu FT-891 sits on a small operating table beneath the umbrella. A laptop running N1MM waits to log contacts. Around the station, tripods and vertical antenna elements form what looks less like a portable field station and more like a miniature HF contest array.

Then Jason taps the key and sends the first CQ.