From left to right, Connor KO0NDR, Skylar NQ9Z (me), Jack KD9WEI, and Nic W0ATS, 2023/2024 Officer team for W9YT BARS.
Hello, I'm Skylar. I'm an undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Civil Engineering, working in heavy civil project management.
I have a pretty wide breadthe of interests and hobbies, which will probably only expand now that I have this thing to keep up with, too. You can probably guess from the name of this site that I'm extremely involved with amateur radio; this will probably be the bulk of what I post about on here. My interest in radio goes back about as far as I can remember, with it initially manifesting itself as a weird obsession with morse code and telegraphy. However, I didn't discover amateur radio proper until somewhere around my junior year of high school, when a bunch of online friends got extremely involved in it. Seeing large HF transceivers with cool knobs and impressive waterfalls piqued my interest, so I dived right into the hobby when I start college, joining the Badger Amateur Radio Society and quickly getting licensed (KD9WYX, April 2023). By October 2024, I upgraded, gaining the callsign AD9FP, before grabbing my current vanity - and this website's namesake.
I have, on and off, maintained my own HF station at various QTHs, and I do have mobile HF capability, but I primarily operate via W9YT's Shack. Something to due with running the club means I'm always around, not sure why.
Outside of radio, I fiddle with electronics (I have my own lab at home, in addition to an unrelated homelab consisting of R710s). Another kind of strange, niche hobby that may show up on my projects at some point is...surveying, believe it or not. I like the math and technical processes. Since before college, I've owned a variety of level tranists, and I happened across an old Sokkia total station at some point, so I've spent a lot of time fiddling around on my own seeing what I can and cannot map. To save myself some flak, none of this is for any actual design or legal purposes; strictly fun in the park.
I do have a knack for Cold War history, specifically pertaining to technology and the role Wisconsin has played in things, so this is also liable to show up time-to-time.