| VK2BLA | ||
| Home | About | Pictures |
| About | |
| Fri May 16 17:14:53 UTC 2008: Amateur Radio: I obtained my limited licence [VK2ZEG] in 1967 and my full Amateur Operators Certificate of Proficiency [VK2BLA] in 1969. I spent the early years working mostly on the 6 and 2 metre bands along with some HF on 80 and 20 metres using a mixture of home brew and modified comercial gear on VHF and FT200, FT101B tranceivers for HF. The aerials were homebrew with the exception of a TA-33 and stacked 6/6 skeleton slot arrays for 2M. I was inactive on the ham bands during the 1980's due, I guess to an interest in reading, collecting old books, travel and messing about with computers. I moved to Inverell in 1991 and began trying out various wire loops, a Marconi style coax. fed 3/4 wavelength wire for 80 metres and inverted V's suspended from a 10 metre mast on the roof. I now use TS-130s and FT-7 tranceivers. A homebrew multiband (80, 40, 30, 15, 10 metre bands) sloping V dipole which forms the top guy wires for a 10 metre mast on the roof. A second end fed 20 metre long wire aerial from the same pole is being constructed... Wed Feb 9 12:46:24 UTC 2011: Now retired and using an FT-897D. The aerial is a 40M loop 3M above roof. Loop was originally square but made into Delta loop to better match 50 OHM coaxial cable and avoid RF gettting into Alarm wiring next door! Loop seems to perform well covering 40-10M bands including WARC bands with an Emtron tuner. Lower mast height is more manageable these days! Computers: I began building things with logic chips and got my first computer [TRS-80 model 1] during the 1970's. I moved to Sydney in 1980 to work in an electronics laboratory. I learned to program in assembler, using a Motorola development system and our own 6802 processor board [2Kb Eprom memory and a couple of Peripheral Interface Adapters] also did a little programming in MPL, HPL and BASIC. The lab. closed in the late 1980's and I worked for a time in the computer service industry repairing IBM, Apple and Commodore systems. I now maintain a few web sites. Essentially XHTML 1.0 standards compliant, written using a simple text editor. Model Railway: HO scale, originally built around 1990 in the top of a bookshelf 30 cm deep, 20-30 cm high and 4700 cm long. Landscape was constructed using natural materials and a few plastic models built during the 1980's. A single main line with branches at each end was controlled by a home made pulse controller, manually or via homebrew computer interface and software. An Intercity 125 train with front and rear engines traversed the un-looped line. Reality is I know nothing about trains, I just enjoy building stuff. Alas, the bookshelf railway had to go, that an old enclosed verandah may return to its former state. (I did salvage a few bits). |
|
| 73's de Bill VK2BLA | |