How to go about documenting your setup?

How to go about documenting your setup?

From Foundations of Amateur Radio by Onno (VK6FLAB)

February 21, 2026 · 5 min

About this episode

This episode discusses the importance of documenting your amateur radio setup and offers insights on how to effectively do so.

Foundations of Amateur Radio How to go about documenting your setup? Possibly the single most important thing that separates science from "fiddling around" is documentation. Figuring out how to document things is often non-trivial and me telling you that "unless you wrote it down, it didn't happen" only goes so far. If documentation isn't your thing, what about "I broke something and I don't know how it was before I fiddled" as an incentive instead? Recently I had cause to explore how to document how my station is configured. To give you a sense, the microphone is connected to a remote-rig, which is connected to a Wi-Fi base station, over Wi-Fi to a Wi-Fi slave, to another remote-rig, to the radio body, to the VHF port, through two coax switches, a run of RG213, to an antenna. When receiving, it goes from the antenna, to a run of RG213, through two coax switches, to the VHF port, to the radio body, to a remote-rig, to a Wi-Fi slave, to a Wi-Fi base station to a remote-rig, to the remote head, to a set of headphones. Of course, at this point I've written it down, so, job done .. right? Well, what about the data connection, the external speaker, the remote head display and other…

Topics covered

  • documentation
  • amateur radio
  • station configuration

Keywords

  • science
  • fiddling
  • configuration
  • documentation methods

Mentioned in this episode

Products: the FT-857d, Graphviz, FT857d, csv2dot, Perl, Python, vk6flab, FT-857d, remote-rig, Wi-Fi base station

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