Hi I'm Peter G4NJJ. I have been a licenced amatuer since 1971. I first discovered ham radio in the mid sixties when I was at secondary school and offshore pirate radio was in full swing. Being a keen listener I started to search the radio dial for other stations. Our radio had short wave on it and I came across the 40mtr ham band. At that time all voice transmissions were AM so there was no problem listening on a domestic receiver. The radio bug had bitten and I had an insatiable urge to posses a transmitter. The first one was a one transistor ( OC44 ) Hartley oscillator. This was absolute magic as it would transmit any where in the medium wave band. I soon found out how to apply some modulation from the crystal pickup of my record player so with a long wire aerial attached I had my own broardcast station! With transistor radio tightly gripped in one hand I peddled off on my bicycle to see how far my signal went. Great! My signal was covering the village where I lived. Seeing an advert in Exchange & Mart for walkie talkie radio's I counted my pocket money and ordered them. They turned out to be CB hand helds on 27.125mhz am (ch14) although in 1967 we didn't know what CB was.
Having left school in 1968 I got a job in a local TV repair shop. Now my technical knowledge was expanding and I purchaced an ex army No 19set. This covered 2-8mhz am/cw. While searching the tuning dial I came across people talking to each other and they were not on amatuer frequencies and they weren't fishing boats. After listening for some time I plucked up the courage, invented a call sign in a similar format to those being used, tuned up the transmitter and called in the net. A friendly responce came back frome a station down in Wiltshire giving me a good signal report. This gave me quite a fright as I didn't expect to be heard. Many good QSO's were had during the following year. Most of these opperators were using similar equipment or home brew gear running 10watts from a 6BW6 valve (10watts was enough power to cover the whole of the British Isles at that time). A number of friends made on Echo Charlie as it was known became amatuers and can still be heard today.
In 1971 I passed my RAE a got the call sign G8FCU and having spent 10years on 2mtrs the desire for hf opperating came back so I passed my morse test at Humber Radio coastal station in1981 and became G4NJJ spending many happy hours traveling from job to job on 10mtrs ssb running 12watts pep mobile from a converted CB multimode. Regular QSO's were being had into the USA, Russia and Europe.
I'm still in the TV trade and have been self employed since 1991. My main interest now is Amatuer Television on 3cm (10ghz). I have a full duplex link on this band with Peter G8JAN in Downham Market. The transmitter generates about 10mw from a Gunn Diode oscillator module from a defunct motion detector feeding a satellite dish and the receiver is a standard satellite receiver with a modified LNB covering 10 - 10.7ghz. We are about 10miles apart but have an obscured path so the help of dishes is required.
