The Ham and the Hacker Are the Same Person

Let me put it this way.

A guy in 1960 sits at a bench soldering a receiver he could have bought, because building it teaches him something buying it never would. He gets it working, then he writes up exactly what he did so the next guy doesn’t have to bleed for it. He signs off “73” — that’s ham for best regards — and drops it in the club newsletter for free.

A guy in 2026 writes a fifty-line bash script to automate a thing he does over and over, comments every line so it’s obvious, and drops it in a public repo under a license that basically says “it’s yours, do whatever.”

Same guy. Same ethos. Sixty years apart.

That’s the whole idea behind hamscripts. It’s a cozy little toolbox of small, focused scripts and how-tos for people who like radios, terminals, and having things Just Work™. Amateur radio was the original maker culture — figure it out, make it work, write it down, give it away. The hacker ethos didn’t invent that. It inherited it.

Scratching a real itch

The scripts here come from actual operating annoyances, not hypotheticals. Take the Winlink Runner — the current headliner.

If you run Winlink (that’s email over radio, no internet required), you know the dance. Start rigctld. Launch the Pat web client. Open the browser to the right page. And when you’re done, shut it all back down without leaving orphan processes muttering to themselves in the background. Every session, the same clicks, in the same order.

The Winlink Runner is one bash helper that does the whole dance for you — starts rigctld, launches Pat, opens the UI in your browser, and handles the shutdown and error cases when you’re finished. You copy a config template, fill in your own values, and run it. That’s it. A small automation that erases a lot of repetitive clicking.

The house rules

Everything here aims at macOS, sometimes Linux. (Windows folks — I love you, but you’re on your own for now.) The scripts are informal, well-commented, and approachable on purpose, because ham radio is supposed to be fun, not a patience stress-test.

Want to add something? Open a PR. The only real rules: keep it idempotent — run it twice, get the same result, no surprises — and comment it well enough that a stranger at 2am can read it and know what’s going on. The whole thing lives under The Unlicense, which is the software equivalent of leaving your tools out on the bench and saying “help yourself.”

The whole toolbox is at github.com/thatsjet/hamscripts. Get on the air. Automate the boring parts. And don’t forget to log your contacts.