{"id":50016,"date":"2026-08-24T13:40:41","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T12:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/?p=50016"},"modified":"2026-10-07T18:37:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T17:37:00","slug":"5-october-building-things-easily-good-tools-for-cheap-by-tom-wardill-m9twm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/blog\/tonight-at-eight-archive\/2026\/08\/24\/5-october-building-things-easily-good-tools-for-cheap-by-tom-wardill-m9twm\/","title":{"rendered":"5 October \u2013 Building things easily, good tools for cheap by Tom Wardill, M9TWM"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><strong>The presentation<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>Amateur radio has always been about making, experimenting, creating, and investigating. The hobby has never been in such a good place for the availability of tools, supplies, and connections to enable entirely new fields being available from home.<\/p>\n<p>A quick guide to what is available to the average home user, from SMT components and PCB fabs, to 3D-printed cases, to test equipment that were only available to IBM and HP just a few years ago. Where to look, how to source, and how to get help with the tools you need to make the projects that you&#8217;ve written off as too complicated.<\/p>\n<h3><strong>About the presenter<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>An inveterate maker and multiple hobby enjoyer, Tom is new(ish) to radio. Interested in the intersection of other hobbies and crafts and trying to bring together the communities of multiple disciplines to make art, tech, useful, and useless things. Very good at starting projects. Generally bad at finishing them.<\/p>\n<p>Tom Wardill is the RSGB Maker Champion. In his role, Tom assists the RSGB in taking amateur radio to new audiences in the hackspace and makerspace communities. Tom also investigates opportunities to encourage crossover in both directions, offering new areas of experimentation to more traditional licence holders. You can meet Tom in the RSGB Village at the National Hamfest 2026 this year.<\/p>\n<h3><strong>Watch live<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><em>Tonight@8<\/em>\u00a0webinars are live-streamed on our<strong>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=STSyIAnKcS4\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">YouTube channel<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/batc.org.uk\/live\/rsgb\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">special BATC channel<\/a>,<\/strong>\u00a0allowing you to watch the presentations and ask questions online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The presentation Amateur radio has always been about making, experimenting, creating, and investigating. The hobby has never been in such a good place for the availability of tools, supplies, and connections to enable entirely new fields being available from home. A quick guide to what is available to the average home user, from SMT components [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20358,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[381],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tonight-at-eight-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20358"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50016"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50668,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50016\/revisions\/50668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rsgb.org\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}