The New AJ0EF.com

Welcome to the new AJ0EF.com.

Or, more properly:

CQ de AJ0EF — (Mis)Adventures in Amateur Radio

This site is meant to be a small public station notebook: part blog, part field journal, part scratchpad, and part reminder to future-me about what present-me was trying to accomplish before the next rabbit hole opened up.

The goal is simple: write down the radio things I am learning, the experiments I am trying, the gear and software I am configuring, and the inevitable mistakes that happen along the way.

Why rebuild it?

I wanted a place that felt more like my own corner of the amateur radio world and less like a generic theme demo with a callsign pasted into the header.

The old shape was close enough to start from, but it still had some rough edges: default theme language, demo content, generic typography, and styling that did not quite say “operator notebook.” It worked, but it did not yet feel like AJ0EF.

So this rebuild became less about launching a perfect website and more about shaping a useful little station logbook.

The look I was after

The design target was something like:

• light-mode-first
• readable
• technical without being harsh
• a little field-journal
• a little radio-log
• a little console-flavored, but not full terminal cosplay

I ended up using the Bilberry Hugo theme as the base. It has enough structure and personality to be interesting, especially with its timeline-style post layout, but it needed some tuning to fit the site.

The main palette settled around deep blue-green, soft off-white, muted gray-green, and a warm amber accent. That combination felt right for a radio notebook: calm, practical, and just technical enough.

Making Bilberry feel like AJ0EF

A lot of the work was not dramatic. It was a pile of small decisions that added up.

The header now gives the callsign more weight. CQ de AJ0EF should feel like the identity of the site, not just a title field. The subtitle, (Mis)Adventures in Amateur Radio, is doing exactly what it says on the tin.

Typography got split by purpose:

• JetBrains Mono for the site chrome, navigation, metadata, tags, and code
• Open Sans for article text, because long-form prose should be comfortable to read

That gives the site a little radio-log / terminal-adjacent flavor without making every paragraph feel like documentation output.

The metadata line also got cleaned up. Dates, reading time, and categories now feel more like part of the station log. Categories and tags became pill-shaped links instead of plain comma- or slash-separated text. That was one of those tiny changes that made the whole theme feel more intentional.

The search box got a small polish pass too. It now stands out enough to be discoverable without yelling for attention.

A few configuration notes

Under the hood this is a Hugo site using Bilberry as a module. Some of the customization lives in hugo.toml, where Bilberry exposes theme colors and font choices as configuration. That handles the broad strokes: background color, article cards, nav colors, footer colors, typography, and similar site-wide choices.

The rest lives in custom CSS loaded after the theme CSS. That layer handles the things Bilberry’s SCSS does not quite expose cleanly, like:

• category pills in the post metadata line
• tag pills at the bottom of posts
• category pills in the footer
• search box polish
• title sizing
• a few selector-specific fixes for Bilberry’s markup

The site is intentionally light-mode-first. I may revisit dark mode later, but I did not want an automatic browser/OS preference to unexpectedly flip the design while I was still trying to get the primary identity right.

What this site will be for

I expect posts here to be a mix of polished notes and honest field log entries.

Some things I may write about:

• station setup
• antennas
• radios and accessories
• logging workflows
• digital modes
• portable operating
• software-defined radio
• things I broke and then eventually understood
• things I broke and still do not understand yet

I am not trying to pretend every entry will be a definitive guide. Some of this will simply be documentation of the learning process.

That is part of the point.

Calling CQ

A radio blog feels like a fitting place to begin with a general call.

CQ de AJ0EF.

If you landed here because you are interested in amateur radio, software, station-building, or just watching someone document the process of figuring things out, welcome.

More soon.

73, Joseph Fox / AJ0EF