What a great journey this has been, and it continues.
I started blogging about amateur radio in August of 2022. Three-plus years later my subscriber base has grown to almost 2,000 people. What started as a way to help me remember what I changed or built has developed a life of its own. Along the way, I’ve enjoyed new relationships and great camaraderie.
Substack has been my publishing platform for the Random Wire newsletter. While I’ve not been entirely happy with the service, the price was right and it seemed to work. Nevertheless, some misgivings have continued to irk me a little bit.
The end of the year is always when I grow more reflective. As I thought about the Random Wire and how to better serve subscribers, I realized I could use the best parts of Substack in a way that would help address the occasional complaints about the length of the newsletter.
And EtherHam℠ was born.
EtherHam is a WordPress site hosted at Namecheap.com. Going forward, my plan is to write individual articles on the EtherHam site, and then include those article titles in a shorter Random Wire newsletter through Substack. This creates several benefits:
- Subscribers won’t have to move with me.
- Random Wire newsletters become shorter, allowing subscribers to hone in on topics they are interested in, instead of wading through a long newsletter.
- Articles are housed at EtherHam.
- Content in the EtherHam articles will be categorized, making it easier to find what you are looking for.
- Conflicts with Substack about paid memberships, affiliate links, and the like go away because support mechanisms shift to the EtherHam instance.
- I gain much more control over the appearance of the content.
I think these are important gains. I still plan on keeping my content free for subscribers. Between earnings from affiliate links and the occasional cup of coffee donated by a subscriber, the Random Wire generated just enough in 2025 to pay for WordPress hosting and a few domain names. This is my minimum goal: cover my out-of-pocket costs. Thank you to every person who has, does, and will help support the Random Wire (and now, EtherHam, too).
So: both brands now exist. The Random Wire continues to live on the Substack platform. EtherHam lives on a WordPress instance at Namecheap.com. As time becomes available, I am slowly converting content from Random Wire format to work better with WordPress. It will take a while to get everything categorized into Topics but the result will be worth it.
Note that since I use a custom domain name for my Substack content, the Random Wire can be moved. That could still happen, depending on how Substack evolves. For now, the Random Wire lives contentedly with Substack.
Thank you again for your support as I take this journey. I appreciate the company.
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