Building a DIY GPS-Disciplined Oscillator (GPSDO) for a Stratum-1 NTP Server - Part 1

Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with building a Stratum-1 NTP server and, as often happens with hobby electronics projects, the scope has grown significantly.

The original goal was fairly straightforward: use an ESP32 and GPS receiver to provide accurate network time to my home lab. The project started with a HackerBox GPS module and quickly evolved into a deep dive into NTP, PPS timing signals, GPS receivers, oscilloscopes, DACs, and oven-controlled crystal oscillators (OCXOs).

From Backyard Wire to Africa: My First DX Contact in Africa

There’s something uniquely satisfying about building a station with your own hands—especially when that effort turns into a signal traveling thousands of miles across the globe. This past week, I finally got my HF setup fully on the air, and it paid off in the best possible way: my first contact into Africa—working D2UY in Angola on FT8.

Here’s how it all came together.

From Panic to Pixels: Migrating My NAS and Recovering an Immich Library the Hard Way

I recently upgraded my homelab storage to a new NAS, and like any good plan, it worked perfectly… right up until it didn’t.

What started as a straightforward data migration turned into a deep dive into Docker, PostgreSQL, and how modern apps actually store data. In the end, I recovered everything—but not before learning a few lessons the hard way.

✈️ Building a Real-Time Aircraft Tracker in My Homelab

Turning a Raspberry Pi and some containers into a live aviation dashboard

🧠 Introduction

One of the things I enjoy most about running a homelab is taking random pieces of technology and turning them into something genuinely useful (or at least really cool).

Recently, I set out to build a system that could answer a simple question:

“What aircraft is closest to my house right now?”

That question turned into a full-blown project involving:

Building Single Sign-On for My Homelab with Authentik and Grafana

Introduction

Like many people running a homelab, I found myself with a growing collection of self-hosted services—Grafana for monitoring, Uptime Kuma for alerts, Portainer for container management, and more.

Each service worked well on its own, but there was one problem:
every service had its own login.

It wasn’t just inconvenient—it also didn’t scale. Managing users, credentials, and access across multiple applications quickly becomes messy.