oeradio.at — Why I Built a Ham Radio Platform With AI
2026-03-05 #Blog | #HamRadio | #AI | #OERadio
After getting my callsign (OE8YML), I did what any reasonable person would do: instead of actually going on the air, I started building tools. The Austrian ham radio landscape had resources scattered all over the place, German-language content was thin, and I had the itch to build something. So oeradio.at was born.
How it started
The first tool was BandBlick — an interactive IARU Region 1 band plan viewer at bandblick.oeradio.at. I kept forgetting which frequencies are allowed where, so I built a web app for it. Classic maker move: I spent more time building the tool than actually operating on the bands. Then the toolbuilding became the hobby.
The AI content experiment
The platform goes beyond calculators. It uses AI heavily for content generation — intentionally and transparently.
- Redakteur Ferdl — an AI editorial persona who writes regular community news and blog content. Not a human. The name and persona are deliberate — it gives the AI a character rather than pretending the content is human-written.
- Hansl Hohlleiter — the AI satire columnist behind “Störsender – Satire auf Sendung”. Think grumpy retired OM energy, but it’s actually an LLM ranting about club politics and the general absurdity of the hobby.
- OERadio Wochenrundspruch — a weekly news roundup for the Austrian ham radio community, generated by AI and published as audio. Club newsletter meets podcast, but the editor is a language model.
- DX weather analysis — AI-generated analysis of current propagation conditions, giving operators a “what’s worth trying this week on the bands” briefing.
- The oeradio.at platform song — yes, the platform has its own song. AI-generated. Because why not.
The honest part
The AI-only approach is intentional and transparent. When Ferdl writes something, it’s AI. When Hansl rants, it’s AI. Errors happen — a wrong date, a slightly hallucinated club name, a DX spot that turned out to be a pirate. They get fixed afterwards. The point is to ship it and see what breaks.
Current AI is genuinely capable at this stuff, but a human is still needed for QA. Not because the AI is dumb — it’s not — but because it has no idea what it doesn’t know, and in a niche domain like Austrian ham radio, that matters. The platform is as much a public stress test of AI capabilities as it is a community tool.
More tools and experiments were coming.
| oeradio.at | GitHub | BandBlick GitHub |