Learning about electronics and antennas
Lately I've been trying to beef up my electronics knowledge, I recently finished "Guide to Understanding Electricity and Electronics" by Randy Slone, and am currently reading Designing Embedded Hardware, 2nd ed. by John Catsoulis (errata) which is pretty much as close as I can expect for a good second book for trying to do something more advanced with electronics, i.e. making a "system" that interfaces with the real-world rather than a just a isolated "gadget."
Of course I've been reading Make magazine published by O'Reilly which I love and hate at the same time. I love the creativity of ideas and approaches, but the authors can annoy me with their "hip" writing style. If you're too cheap to shell out for the paper copy, check out Instructables.com which tends to have many of the projects on their site, in either a prequel or revised version.
I have also been looking at extending my practical RF knowledge by better understanding antennas, so I signed up for an ARRL online antenna modeling course. I did buy EZNEC 4.0, which is a nice friendly program, but I likely could of got by with 4nec2, a free open-source program for Windows based upon NEC-2. Hopefully I will come away with a better understanding of antennas and the tools to model their performance.