The MUD microwave hams really make incredible Rube-Golbergish contraptions! Really high frequencies too, above 100 GHz. Worthy of top hackaday posts.

Lots of beautiful consoles with Twist-Lites and Roto-tellites, like the NASA Apollo control panels (Titan II museum)

You need a functioning paper tape reader to nuke your enemy (Titan II museum).

More scary but impressive Titan II.

Temporarily escaped from the microwave conf to see the nearby Titan II museum. Fortunately most of these ended up sending satellites instead of nukes.

Short notice heads up, I’m the invited speaker for this year’s Microwave Update event (MUD 2025), and will give a talk on the Apollo comms system on Saturday evening (10/18/2025). Come say hi if you are in the neighborhood. It’s starting good, with absolutely giant cactus right out of the airport!

We'll be exhibiting at Opensauce next week. The booth will be a re-creation of my basement lab. We'll do live restorations on a bunch of hardware, including Apollo, HP, and the analog computer from the astrotracker. Come say hi in person!
Marc & Team