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 approach to 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 be interpreted as "the highest possible distance" 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 mainly interested in the digital modes: first of all PSK, but RTTY as well. I am also considering the idea of playing around a bit with SSTV.
Another field of interest for me is antenna design and construction: I started several years ago with a ground-plane for the 144 MHz band, then I designed and built a 4-element Yagi for the 50 MHz band. As soon as I obtained my "class A" license I designed and built a rotating dipole for the 14 MHz band, closely followed by a... let's say... pseudo-windom antenna ("pseudo" in the sense that its dimensions weren't the canonical ones due to physical limitations) that anyway performed surprisingly well. After a stop of some years due to the forced removal of all my antennas, in the summer of 2010 I finally returned active on-air and, obviously, the first thing I did was to design and build a new antenna: in this case, a full-length multiwire dipole array for the five upper HF bands. Presently I am playing around with a trapped vertical for the 80 metres band and am also in the preliminary design phase for a 2-element trapped yagi for the 20 metres 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 camping car, in Autumn 1998 we decided to buy one: due to budgetary constraints, our choice fell on an extremely old but well kept and small one. It was very slow (we could travel on the motorway at an average speed around 80 or 90 Km/h) and there wasn't much room inside even for just the two of us, but soon we studied and built some improvements for getting as much as we could out of it.
That way we could travel around in Europe fairly well for about ten years but eventually we had to give up with it in 2008, when we had to accept the fact that 31 years of honourable service had to be considered more than enough. Now we are waiting for the moment when we'll be able to buy another one...
I like using my hands for building things: the two different fields in which I usually apply my skills are respectively the construction of equipment for my amateur radio activity and the construction or the maintenance of items used in my home.
On the ham radio side, I built several things, from power supplies, to antenna tuners, to useful gadgets for the shack. Maybe sooner or later I'll dedicate a page in this site to some of those realisations.
On the home side, Daniela and I had plenty of chances to put our skills at work along the years, while carrying out BIG works on our house, since we wanted both to save money and to have things done the way we expected them to be. Now that such works are finally over, well, I wouldn't be surprised if we'd find new ways to keep ourselves busy in some new projects!
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 J.R.R. Tolkien (of course!), D. Eddings, H. Turtledove, D. Gemmell...
My musical preferences instead vary from time to time even across the same day, according to my mood, so my choices can vary from Gregorian Chants to "classical" music, to jazz and to the loudest heavy metal. My preferences reflect this: Beethoven, Charlie Parker, Brahms, Iron Maiden...
On the gaming side, even if I enjoy computer games since some time I have to face the fact that I am not as good at them as I used to be in the past (I wonder why...) so I completely dropped the arcade games (I never liked them much, anyway) in favour of more slowly-paced adventure and strategy games. To name just some games I enjoyed in the past (and I am still enjoying now), I would mention the Baldur's Gate series.
Still on the gaming side, I am also participating since several years to some PBEM RPG's with a group of friends of mine, though I have to admit that since some time I am having some problems with regularly posting my actions.