So, let's spend a few words about me. In brief:
Here are some of my too many interests:
In regard to amateur radio my way of approaching it is to achieve the best possible results with the least possible investment: this implies the use of either second-hand and homemade equipment.
The term "best possible results" above has to interpreted as "the highest possible distance (QRB)" in VHF and as "the highest possible number of confirmed entities" in HF: however the latter does not necessarily imply the 5B-DXCC with Honor Roll or similar achievements, since my results will always have to be weighted against the level of the employed equipment.
I am also interested in QRP, RTTY and SSTV: up to now I have been doing little or nothing in those fields, due to the absolute lack of such activities in VHF, but I am planning to start working in those directions some time in the relatively near future.
Another field of interest for me is antenna design and building: I started several years ago with a ground-plane for the 144 MHz band and more recently I have built a 4-element Yagi for the 50 MHz band. Soon (I hope) I'll start working around a Yagi for the 14 MHz band.
Daniela and I have always loved travelling, but we had always to confront ourselves with two obstacles: costs and freedom of movement. These limitations led us to make use of a camping tent, but it wasn't a satisfactory solution:
In this way, we could not go out for just a weekend, neither we could visit a region by moving our "home" from place to place. Unfortunately, these two were exactly our main objectives!
So, after an experiment of hiring a camper, in Autumn 1998 we decided to buy one: due to budgetary constraints, our choice fell on an extremely old but well kept small camper. It is very slow (we can travel on the motorway at an average speed around 80 or 90 Km/h) and there isn't much room inside even for just two people, but we are now studying some improvements for getting as much as we can out of it.
Our experiences with it haven't been so many up to now, just half a dozen weekends out, but the solution we chose looks promising!
I like using my hands for building things: the two different fields in which I apply my skills are respectively meant for producing equipment for my amateur radio activity and for producing items for my home and my camper.
On the ham radio side, I am currently building an antenna tuner I designed and that is meant to be used in conjunction with a long wire antenna I am going to install as soon as the works on the building at the far side of it will be completed. I have also built a few more items useful in the shack and more will be built in the future.
Maybe sooner or later I'll publish in this site some of the schematics of my designs.
On the home and camper side, I have had plenty of chances to put my skills at work in the past, when Daniela and I carried out BIG works on our home, since we wanted both to save money and to have things done the way we expected them to be. Now that we have less to do on our home we are planning some maintainance and transformation works on our camper, in order to make it the best possible fit to our needs.
I enjoy both reading and listening to music. I also like computer gaming.
My preferred readings, apart from books and magazines about electronics and ham radio, are science fiction and fantasy novels. Among my preferred authors are Tolkien (of course!), Eddings, Turtledove, Gemmell...
My musical preferences instead vary from time to time, according to my mood, so my choices can vary from Gregorian Chants to "classical" music, to jazz and to the most brutal heavy metal. My preferences reflect this: Beethoven, Charlie Parker, Brahms, Iron Maiden...
On the gaming side, I enjoy computer games, but I have to start facing the fact that I am not as good at them as I used to be in the past (I wonder why...) so I have completely dropped the arcade games (I have never liked them much, anyway) in favor of adventure and strategy games.
Still on the gaming side, I am involved since nearly one year in a play-by-e-mail strategy game called "Lorenai": it is my first experience in such a game and, in spite of some flaws in the game management and in some parts of the rules, I find it very interesting and addictive. For anyone interested in taking a look at how it is, here is the URL: http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/lorenai/.