Ham radio is techie stuff, right? I spent most of the past few months (when I wasn't working from home for my day job as a software developer) finally getting an HOA-sanctioned home station set up. Before now, I never thought to bother to do so because antennas aren't really a thing HOAs in general like, so I would typically travel elsewhere to operate.

Anyway, I got a magnetic loop antenna onto my 2 story building's flat roof (with a ~5ft mast holding it horizontally above the roof). This is a lot smaller of an antenna than people usually use for HF (< 30 MHz), but it performs reasonably well. The downside is that I have to retune it using an indoor control box every time I change frequencies on the radio, but I don't typically move around much when operating anyway.

I also did a fair bit of soldering and Arduino programming for an interface between a handheld RF amplifier and my portable radio. It basically communicates serially with the radio and generates voltages that the amplifier recognizes depending on what frequency the radio is on (which then cause the correct low pass filter to be switched inline).

As for computer stuff, I managed to get Let's Encrypt to automatically perform DNS validation of one of the VMs I manage for some people I know (required for wildcard certificates). I'm also thinking that I want to finally replace the last Ethernet switch that I need to replace to have the entire condo's LAN 10 gigabit capable. For that, I may try the Mikrotik CRS309-1G-8S+IN with the needed 1/10GBaseT modules as my CRS312-4C+8XG-RM has performed well since I got it.

Longer term (if there's another lockdown, which is very possible at this point), I'm thinking I may want to finally build a replacement for the FreeNAS server that we have here, with newer/more hardware/drives and using RAIDZ2 instead of what's effectively RAID10. And try to silence it altogether if at all possible, too.