Hollow Band Logs
In early 2026 I paid twelve dollars at an estate sale in Loudon County, Tennessee for a box of paper logbooks. They had belonged to Vernon Earl Sutton — Signal Corps in the Pacific, then a lineman in the Coeburn coalfields, then a licensed amateur radio operator from 1947 until the morning his daughter found him in his chair in March of 1985. Callsign W4HBL.
The logs are terse. Time, frequency, callsign, signal report. Vernon was not a confessional man. But between the entries, in the margins and the silences and the propagation notes that don't quite line up with the weather, there is something else going on. I'm a licensed operator myself. I have the rigs to tune the same bands he tuned. So I have been.
No monsters. No pantheon. No mountain mysticism. Just a single man's logbook, the frequencies he worked, and what shows up when you point a real antenna at the same sky he was pointing his at.