Thoughts about amateur radio, life, and more. #AmateurRadio #RandomWire #KJ7T. Click to read Random Wire℠, by Tom Salzer, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

When we moved to Munich in 2024 I wanted a bicycle, but I could never settle on which one to buy. An e-bike, a nice hybrid, a folding bike? The choices were endless and the whole thing felt overwhe…

My father turned 70 last week. We gathered in Norwich to mark it, and somewhere between the cake and the catching up my mind wandered back to a 5-day walk we took together almost ten years ago.

Chen organised it as a surprise, which she is far better at than I am. All I knew was that we were heading south for our anniversary, into the green middle of the Izu Peninsula (伊豆半島). In an ordina…

I’m behind on posting this given we’re well into spring, but I wanted to share some photos from winter in and around Munich. We had snow on and off until early April, which was magical …

The escalators in Munich’s U-Bahn are bidirectional. Not one up, one down: just one, and it goes whichever way the first person to step on it wants to go. If someone’s riding down and y…

I’ve been a WordPress user since 2004. My personal blog has run on it ever since. I’ve set it up for friends and family, watched it evolve through every major phase, and never seriously…

Tōhoku is the part of Japan that most Japanese think of as countryside. The six prefectures that make up the region stretch across the northern third of Honshu, where the cities thin out and the mo…

Pictures of pale pink cherry blossom are all over Instagram again. Sakura season in Japan gets me every year. The whole country looks up at the trees for a week or two. People gather under branches…

After Mt. Haguro we headed by train to Akita City (秋田市). We had both been feeling under the weather all week and I had a migraine. I think we were just tired after a couple of weeks on the road. We…

After visiting Yamadera, we took a train from Yamagata to Tsuruoka and then a bus east to Tōge (羽黒町手向), a small village at the foot of Mt. Haguro. There was only one other person on the bus, anothe…

After a week spent reacquainting ourselves with Tokyo, we took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Sendai early on a Saturday morning. Our first stop was the Sendai Mediatheque, Toyo Ito’s celebrated glas…

In 2016, Craig Mod and Dan Rubin published Koya Bound, a beautiful photo book covering an eight day hike on the Kumano Kodō pilgrimage trail in Japan. Alongside this they made a companion website with a map which scrolled alongside the narrative. The way the map followed the narrative as you scrolled felt like the […]

Tokyo is a multitude of cities, blending residential and commercial spaces in unexpected ways. Its unique zoning laws allow small shops, restaurants, and businesses to exist seamlessly alongside homes in nearly every neighbourhood. Unlike many Western cities with strict separation between zones, Tokyo’s approach creates vibrant, walkable communities where daily necessities are always within reach. […]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we came across an old, disused trail above our house, which led all the way up to a beautiful lookout point on the Kamakura coastline, where we lived at the time. We spent many happy weekends clearing the trail of debris to make it easier to walk, even though we left […]

Landing back in Munich after India and Sichuan felt jarring. Autumn had arrived and amid the crisp mornings and golden light it felt as if time had slowed down. We visited museums in Munich and across the border in Austria. It felt as if we had moved from a state of making history to observing […]

Though Anthony Bourdain visited neighbouring Chengdu twice—once for No Reservations (2006) and again for Parts Unknown (2016), he never visited Chongqing (重庆), which is a shame because I think it would have been right in his wheelhouse. This is what I imagine he might have written if he had. Chongqing doesn’t care what you think. […]

Sichuan is renowned for its extraordinary legacy of Buddhist cave and cliff carvings, ranging from monumental statues to intimate grottoes. Many of these masterpieces, carved into sheer cliffs and forested hillsides, remain little known and rarely visited. Their remoteness has preserved not only their physical beauty but also a sense of awe that is heightened […]

A weathered wooden derrick marks the site of an eleven-centimetre-wide borehole drilled 1,001 metres into the earth at Shenhaijing Salt Well (燊海井). Completed in 1835 during the Qing dynasty, it is widely regarded as the first artificially drilled well to surpass the thousand-metre mark, achieved using bamboo tools, wooden derricks, and human-powered percussion – without […]