Work below the software layer.

My products have always sat on physics I took on faith: radio links, sensor noise, the silicon under the code. In the field I work at the top of that stack (400+ thermal-drone missions over Bavarian meadows). This page is what sits underneath, worked first-hand: primary sources, boards on the bench, one layer at a time.

RF & Embedded · UWB Ranging

How far away is my dog on our walks, in centimeters, live?

The dog is Loki, a Labrador working his way through Bavaria’s hunting-dog exams. The question cost €149 in dev boards and opened the deepest thread on this page. Two Ai-Thinker BU04 boards (Qorvo DW3000 radios) did live two-way ranging on my desk: distance readout over serial, accurate to about two centimeters, checked against a tape measure laid between them.

The boards range out of the box; understanding them was the actual project. I wrote myself a nine-phase curriculum (embedded C, RF propagation, chip-level radio work) with stop-and-verify gates on every lesson, and worked it on a bare-metal STM32: boot model, linker script, memory-mapped registers, OpenOCD debugging. No HAL, no Arduino, no generated firmware.

• Phase 0: Setup, tooling, foundations
• Phase 1: Embedded & C fundamentals
• Phase 2: RF & signal foundations
• Phase 3: DW3000 chip basics
• Phase 4: First range: SS-TWR
• Phase 5: Better range: DS-TWR + antenna-delay calibration
• Phase 6: Field-test & harden
• Phase 7: Display
• Phase 8: Direction: PDoA / AoA
• Phase 9: Doppler primer

The hardware delivered its first lesson early: I assumed the BU04 carried an ESP32, the documentation said STM32F103, and the whole curriculum repivoted from ESP-IDF to bare-metal STM32 within a day.

Spectrum · SDR Receiving

What is actually in the air around me?

A HackRF One with a PortaPack runs standalone, no laptop needed. Received and decoded: aircraft transponders (ADS-B), ship traffic (AIS), weather satellites, ham voice, broadcast, plus a lot of waterfall time learning to tell a real signal from an artifact. The waterfall is the map, and reading it is the skill. I kept analyst-style cheat sheets as I went: bands and modulation, a discovery workflow (“there’s a blip, now how do I hear it?”), decode modes, antenna choices.

The rules matter here. Receiving is broadly legal in Germany; transmitting without a licence is not, so the radio stayed in receive and I worked through the Class A amateur-licence syllabus, as much for the RF theory as for the licence itself. The active side of the spectrum stayed theoretical for the same reason: a 17-chapter electronic-warfare curriculum, from spectrum fundamentals up.

Fabrication · 3D Printing & CAD

How does an idea become a part that fits?

I model in SolidWorks and print on a QIDI Q2, both learned from zero, one part at a time. The printer’s main customer was the bench itself: a printer riser, an air-blower adapter, a desiccant storage box for the filament dryer, and an enclosure for an ESP32 dev board.

The early lesson: printing is mostly materials discipline. Filament is hygroscopic and prints badly wet, so drying became its own small experiment: a dryer, airtight desiccant boxes, trial runs across PLA, PETG, and ASA at different temperatures and humidities. Screw threads want heat-set brass inserts, not cut plastic. A soldering station covers the electronics side of the same builds.

Decision · Intelligence Tradecraft

How does sensor data become a decision someone will stake something on?

Every rescue-season morning I run a small version of this loop myself: fields reported, drones tasked, finds triaged, crews dispatched. The literature reads less like theory than like scaled-up versions of problems I’ve already had. The reading program: Cynthia Grabo’s Anticipating Surprise on warning intelligence, Mark Lowenthal’s Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, Robert Clark’s target-centric Intelligence Analysis, and Biltgen & Ryan’s Activity-Based Intelligence. Alongside the books I kept the domain itself as a linked graph (missions, functions, platforms, payloads, sensors), 140 notes deep, so every new concept had to earn a place in an explicit structure.

The thread I kept pulling was sensor fusion: how observations from different sensors, none sufficient alone, become one picture somebody can act on.

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The company I’m building needs this layer. I’m looking for a technical cofounder: RF and embedded. Say hello.