I keep one modest station on the edge of Šiauliai, put up wire antennas that only just fit, and write down what the high-frequency bands actually do over this flat country, season after season.

This is the notebook of one station on the edge of Šiauliai, where the town gives out into ploughed fields and the horizon is a line of birches half a kilometre off. I have been licensed since 2020 and on the air from this garden since the autumn of that year, working mostly the high-frequency bands with wire antennas I put up myself. The notebook existed long before the site did: a squared A4 book beside the radio, a clock set to UTC, and the habit of writing down the hour before anything else.

What gets written here is what the plain around this town does to radio, which is not the same as what a handbook says. Flat ground, wet fields, a shallow water table and almost no hills mean the low bands behave well and the higher ones are honest about the sun. I write up band conditions season by season, the antennas I have managed to fit into thirty metres of garden, and the accessories I build on the kitchen table in winter when it is too cold to be outside holding a ladder.

Nothing here is instruction and nothing is for sale. I name no callsigns, not mine and not anyone else's, because a log is a private thing and the people I talk to did not agree to appear on a web page. Contests get written about the way a long walk gets written about — as a day out with a purpose, not a result. If somebody newly licensed reads a page here and understands why the band went quiet at nine in the evening, the notebook has done more than it was built for.