IU8QTM de Emilio — a curious experimenter with radio waves

My aunt's old valve radio, and a question that never left me

I'm Emilio, IU8QTM. It all started with my aunt's old valve radio: the smell when she switched it on, the hum before the signal settled in, the foreign stations she'd tune in through the background noise. I'd watch and wonder who those voices belonged to, where they came from, how they travelled all that way with no wires at all.

That question stayed with me for years, all the way to my amateur radio licence and the callsign IU8QTM. I never really stopped since: antennas built from whatever was in the garage, hikes up into the mountains with a backpack full of cable, afternoons spent figuring out why one stub matches and another one doesn't.

Today I live in Cilento, where together with my partner Cat I run a small B&B among the trails of the National Park — the same landscape where I activate POTA and SOTA, often with the antenna in my backpack next to water bottles and trail maps. I don't call myself an engineer: I'm a curious person who takes things apart, tests them, gets it wrong sometimes, and shares what I find, on camera exactly as it happens, no expert filter.

The Onde Radio in Cammino channel was born to share exactly that journey, often alongside friends and fellow operators like Ricky IU1PZC ("QRP e Sentieri"), Leo CT7AUE, Alessandro IZ4VQS and Angelo IU2VWK — people who've taught me more than any manual ever could, and who I always try to credit whenever a project grows out of a shared idea.