Tag: diy

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Ancient Web: AA5TB Has Been Publishing Ham Radio Notes Since 1998

AA5TB is what happens when a ham-radio notebook gets a domain name and then survives for nearly three decades.

Visit AA5TB

The site belongs to Steve Yates of Fort Worth, Texas. He notes that the pages were first established in July 1998 and that he was first licensed as an amateur-radio operator in 1979.

That difference matters.

The website was not the beginning of the hobby. It was the point when decades of accumulated radio work started becoming searchable by everybody else.

The site covers antennas, small transmitting loops, end-fed half-wave antennas, dipoles, T-monopoles, QRP couplers, higher-power couplers, homemade baluns, coax for field use, and other practical topics that radio people can argue about indefinitely and then go outside to test anyway.

Personal technical pages age differently

A lot of technical websites become obsolete because they explain one software version, one product, or one API.

A page about the behavior of a piece of wire at radio frequency can last much longer.

AA5TB has that quality. Its subject matter is old physics being applied by actual people in garages, workshops, fields, portable stations, and back yards. Component choices change. Suppliers disappear. Radios improve. The wavelength is still the wavelength.

The site’s plain presentation also makes the underlying work easy to see. It is not trying to sell a lifestyle around amateur radio. It is mostly an accumulation of diagrams, formulas, measurements, designs, and explanations.

That was one of the strongest forms of the personal Web.

A person developed expertise, wrote down what worked, and linked the pages together. Search engines eventually made that private notebook discoverable to somebody on the other side of the world trying to solve the same problem.

Yates even quotes the FCC definition of amateur service on the homepage: radio communication for self-training, intercommunication, and technical investigations by authorized amateurs with a personal rather than commercial aim.

The website follows the same spirit.

It is a technical archive created because the material was worth sharing, not because every page needed a conversion funnel.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list keeps turning up ham-radio sites because radio amateurs were extremely well prepared for the early Web. They already liked networks, technical documentation, strange identifiers, and talking to people they had never met.

HTML was basically another mode.

Explore Steve Yates’s AA5TB radio pages

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Ancient Web: The Board Lady Turned Thousands of Epoxy Repairs Into a Field Manual

There are repair websites written by people who read the manual, and there are repair websites written by people who have already seen the exact stupid thing you just did to your expensive board.

Visit The Board Lady repair archive

Eva Hollmann’s Board Lady site is emphatically the second kind.

The homepage describes her as the “Queen of Fix” and says thousands of epoxy water-toy repairs passed through her hands. The repair menu turns that experience into a sprawling technical reference covering fiberglass, sandwich construction, fiber orientation, inserts, vacuum bagging, soft decks, nose and rail damage, powerbox replacement, fin repair, leak testing, paint, non-skid surfaces, and the kind of ugly structural failures that do not fit into a five-minute tutorial.

It is less a blog than a field manual written by somebody with resin under her fingernails.

The useful knowledge lives between the official procedures

Composite boards are deceptive objects.

From the outside they look smooth and simple. Inside, they can be combinations of foam cores, fiberglass, carbon, veneers, high-density inserts, sandwich materials, adhesives, paint systems, and hardware that transfers large loads through a very small area.

That means a repair can look cosmetic while the actual problem is structural.

The Board Lady spends a lot of time on that distinction.

Pages explain how damage progresses, why soft decks form, how loads move through sandwich construction, when vacuum bagging matters, how to think about fiber direction, and why simply filling a hole is not the same thing as rebuilding the part of the board that used to carry the load.

The tone helps. Hollmann openly calls the material the “Gospel according to Eva” and warns readers to be critical rather than treating her procedures as universal law. The legal page says the purpose is to pass along repair experience and make epoxy-board owners more aware of their equipment’s strengths and weaknesses.

That is a good description of expert Web writing at its best.

It is not pretending to be a standards body. It is documenting hard-won pattern recognition.

The repair menu is especially valuable because it keeps the failures organized visually and structurally. A crushed sandwich rail, a soft deck, a broken fin box, and a leaking insert are not just variations of “board damaged.” They fail differently and need different reasoning.

In 2026, much of this knowledge would probably be scattered across short videos, social posts, and private groups. Those formats are excellent for showing a technique and terrible at becoming a durable reference library.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because a specialist who documents thousands of repairs can accidentally create something more useful than a manufacturer’s support page.

Also, the repair menu ends with a joke about the bigger hammer.

Correct shop culture has been observed.

Browse The Board Lady repair menu

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Ancient Web: Laurent Besset Built a Solar Balloon Handbook Out of Black Plastic and Sunlight

Laurent Besset’s solar-balloon site starts with a delightfully old-web proposition: black plastic, sunshine, Archimedes, and enough patience can get something airborne.

Visit the solar balloon site

A solar balloon is an ultralight hot-air balloon whose envelope absorbs solar radiation instead of being heated by a burner.

Besset’s English section explains the principle, materials, construction, tethered and free flight, experimental uses, historical examples, and several scales of balloon.

The numbers make the concept immediately tangible.

The site says a four-meter balloon can lift about 2 kilograms, an eleven-meter balloon about 55 kilograms, and a 14.5-meter balloon about 120 kilograms under suitable conditions.

At the tiny end, there is a mini-balloon made from black plastic trash bags, adhesive tape, and ordinary household tools that can lift roughly 80 grams.

A hobby site with engineering underneath it

The archive is not just a set of pretty balloon photographs.

It includes discussions of thermal radiation, polyethylene film, buoyancy, materials, construction methods, free-flight technique, payloads, radio-amateur uses, educational experiments, and reports from actual launches.

One page points to a June 2000 flight in Grenoble. Other material reaches back to a 1982 Pif Gadget feature involving a small cylindrical solar balloon.

The larger site describes more than ninety pages, over eighty drawings, and more than 160 photographs across its multilingual material.

Its presentation is also a period artifact.

There are separate French, English, and Spanish sections, links to a Yahoo Groups solar-balloon community, hand-made navigation graphics, and badges proudly announcing conformance with XHTML, HTML, and CSS standards.

That last part is worth remembering. There was a period when putting a validator badge on the bottom of a page felt like bolting an inspection plate to something you had built yourself.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains technical hobby sites like this because they often preserve the practical middle layer between a scientific principle and somebody actually trying it in a field.

The sun provides the heat.

The website provides everything else you forgot to ask before buying the plastic.

Return to Laurent Besset’s solar-balloon archive

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Ancient Web: P-Car Built a Porsche 993 DIY Library One Repair at a Time

P-Car’s Porsche 993 DIY section has the tone of somebody who likes driving the car but may like taking it apart almost as much.

Visit P-Car

The author says half the fun of owning a Porsche 911 is working on it, and then proceeds to back that up with a very large collection of repair and modification pages focused on the 993 generation.

The archive is not a glossy buyer’s guide.

It is a garage notebook with hyperlinks.

The repair database grew job by job

The DIY index is divided into basics, scheduled maintenance, repairs, and modifications.

Routine jobs include oil changes, brake work, spark plugs, transmission fluid, distributor caps and rotors, belts, filters, and brake-system flushing.

Repair pages go deeper: alternator removal, clutch problems, spoiler mechanisms, seat-drive shafts, DME relays, steering racks, wheel bearings, starter replacement, odometer repair, air-conditioning diagnostics, and more.

The modification section is equally specific, with suspension work, aero-kit installation, harnesses, lighting, oil coolers, gauge faces, Recaro seats, radio controls, and other owner projects.

Many entries are dated from the early 2000s. Some were contributed by other owners, which turns the site into a small community technical library rather than a single person’s notes.

The individual pages preserve exactly the details that disappear when a forum thread breaks: tool sizes, part numbers, difficulty estimates, photographs, order of operations, and warnings about what not to drop into the engine bay.

One oil-change article specifies roughly eleven quarts of oil, two filters, drain-plug seals, and the exact Porsche part numbers involved. Another contributed procedure explains how to clean the idle stabilizer valve with basic hand tools and solvent.

That specificity is why old enthusiast sites remain useful.

A broad article can tell you that a 993 is maintainable.

A page written by somebody who actually removed the part can tell you which 7 mm socket you need.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes enthusiast sites because the best of them quietly accumulated practical knowledge for years.

P-Car is one of those garages that happened to have a web server attached.

Return to P-Car

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Ancient Web: Tetsuo Kogawa Put Micro-Radio Transmitter Workshops on the Web

Tetsuo Kogawa’s transmitter page begins with a question that explains the entire project: why make transmission technology less esoteric?

His answer is basically that radio has interesting possibilities for art.

Visit Tetsuo Kogawa’s micro-transmitter workshop

The page then gets extremely practical.

It includes a simple FM transmitter, component lists, basic tools, step-by-step pictorial instructions, tuning FAQs, antenna information, power-supply notes, TV transmitter designs, and more advanced one-to-three-watt FM material that explicitly warns builders not to proceed without a power meter and frequency counter.

Some schematics are offered as PDF, JPG, symbolic diagrams, and even VRML.

That last format alone dates the web neighborhood nicely.

A workshop that became an archive

The most useful part of the site is that it does not separate electronics from its cultural history.

Kogawa links the technical material to a chronology of transmitter workshops. The page points to an earlier private workshop on June 3, 1990, a first public workshop on April 28, 1991, and a first U.S. workshop at Paper Tiger Television on November 4, 1991.

Video survives alongside the circuit diagrams.

That gives the page a different character from a generic electronics tutorial. The transmitter is not presented merely as a gadget. It is part of a practice: build the device, understand enough radio to operate it, then use transmission as a creative medium.

The page’s construction also belongs to the old technical web. It assumes the visitor is willing to follow diagrams, read theory, acquire tools, solder components, troubleshoot, and learn from linked documents rather than watch a single polished video.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many pages where technical knowledge and a particular subculture became inseparable.

Kogawa’s workshop is one of the better examples.

The web page does not merely tell you that micro-radio art existed.

It leaves the bench laid out.

Return to Tetsuo Kogawa’s micro-transmitter workshop

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Ancient Web: DOS4Ever Is an Electronics Bench That Happens to Be a Website

DOS4Ever feels less like a website than somebody left the door to an electronics workshop open and labeled every bench.

Visit DOS4Ever

Ronald Dekker explains the purpose plainly: he enjoys visiting other people’s electronic project sites, so he made one of his own. The pages show what he has built and double as documentation for himself.

That second purpose explains why the site is so useful.

The projects are not polished showcase photos with a shopping list underneath. They include circuit descriptions, software, design reasoning, measurements, historical notes, and enough detail that another electronics hobbyist can understand what happened.

Nixies, PICs, tubes, and old processors everywhere

The index sprawls across Nixie clocks, a talking alarm clock, Numitron and Dekatron projects, analog meter clocks, tube curve tracers, a tiny oscilloscope built around an eight-pin PIC, a one-chip Pong implementation, 8051-family hardware, and an SC/MP computer running NIBL Tiny BASIC.

There is also the µTracer series, a miniature vacuum-tube curve tracer that uses pulsed measurements and small high-voltage converters instead of the heavy power supplies associated with traditional test equipment.

Then the site wanders into electronics history.

Dekker documents obscure Philips tubes, early television research, the EF50 valve’s wartime history, postwar Dutch electronics hobby culture, restoration of old radios, and even experiments involving artificial ball lightning.

This is exactly the sort of technical personal site search engines are bad at summarizing because its value is cumulative. No single article explains DOS4Ever. The useful object is the pile: years of projects, failed assumptions, measurements, diagrams, historical digging, and software all cross-linked from one person’s index.

The homepage even tells visitors they may copy, distribute, or sell the project material as far as the author is concerned, while making the predictable warning that he is not responsible if anybody electrocutes themselves or otherwise creates a disaster.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes technical sites like this because the old web was full of specialists publishing the notebook, not just the finished object.

DOS4Ever is still a very good notebook.

Return to DOS4Ever

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Ancient Web: Graphite Galaxy Teaches Telescope Making One Homemade Part at a Time

Graphite Galaxy belongs to the branch of amateur astronomy where buying the tool is considered suspiciously easy.

Visit Graphite Galaxy

The site mixes observing material with practical telescope projects and homemade accessories. One surviving tutorial shows how to build a Cheshire-style collimation eyepiece from basic materials, including a wonderfully old-school geometry lesson for drawing the required ellipse using pins, thread, paper, and a pencil.

That small detail explains the site better than any mission statement could.

Astronomy before every accessory had a product page

Amateur telescopes require alignment, adjustment, adapters, eyepieces, mounts, and endless small pieces of hardware.

Modern astronomy retail can sell almost every one of those problems back to you as a finished accessory.

Older hobby pages often took the opposite approach: here is what the part does, here is the geometry, here is some pipe, now make one.

Graphite Galaxy preserves that maker culture.

Its technical material is useful because it explains mechanisms rather than just recommending equipment. A collimation tool is not magic. It is a controlled line of sight and a reflective surface arranged so the telescope’s optical axes can be checked. Once the geometry is understood, the homemade version becomes obvious.

That style of documentation transfers.

Even if a visitor never builds the exact project, the page teaches enough to understand commercial tools better. It also preserves a version of amateur astronomy where improvisation was normal because specialty hardware was expensive, hard to source, or simply more fun to fabricate at the workbench.

The same pattern appears throughout CacheRat’s 1,967-domain Ancient Web list: enthusiasts documenting not only what they owned, but what they changed, built, measured, repaired, and learned.

Search has made product discovery much easier.

It has not necessarily made people better at understanding their equipment.

Graphite Galaxy still assumes the reader might prefer the second option.

Return to Graphite Galaxy

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Ancient Web: Woodgears Teaches Beginner Woodworking Without Selling You a Workshop

A lot of beginner woodworking advice quietly turns into a shopping list. Woodgears.ca takes the opposite approach: buy a few tools, make something ugly, and let actual work tell you what you need next.

Visit Woodgears’ beginner woodworking guide

The page starts with hand tools, clamps, a work surface, a drill and a jigsaw. From there it moves through circular saws, planes, table saws, drill presses, bandsaws, routers, planers and other shop equipment in roughly the order they become useful.

The important part is not the list. It is the attitude behind it.

The author repeatedly argues against buying expensive equipment before experience creates a reason for it. Cheap tools are acceptable. Used tools are acceptable. A contractor saw from decades ago is acceptable. The difference between a cheap drill press and no drill press, the page notes, is often more important than the difference between a cheap one and a premium one.

A technical page that has opinions

This is also why Woodgears feels different from modern affiliate-heavy tool content.

The page dislikes some fashionable purchases. Compound sliding miter saws are treated skeptically. Multi-function machines get a warning. A pre-built workbench is questioned because building the bench is itself a good beginner project. Track saws, cordless tools, nail guns and scroll saws all get contextual treatment instead of automatic recommendations.

That makes the article useful even years later. Brand names and prices change. The decision-making process does not.

The surrounding Woodgears site is similarly dense with woodworking machines, homemade tools, jigs, furniture, mechanisms and experiments. It is the kind of site where a practical answer can lead to three hours of clicking through somebody else’s workshop.

For webmasters, the lesson is equally simple: a durable technical page does not need to chase every product cycle if it explains how to think about the problem.

This site was found in CacheRat’s broader Ancient Web research corpus.

Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

Woodgears remains useful because it teaches a beginner how to start woodworking, not how to become a customer.

Return to the Woodgears beginner guide