Introduction
These pages are really for my own use. I find my memory is
probably not as good as it used to be, although I could be
misremembering that. Also when I start a new project, like most
other people, I check about on Google; I thought perhaps I could
give something back - or at least that all those hours spent
tinkering might not be wasted. So here are my notes.
I have always been interested in radio. I think some people are
more suited to radio than others. I have a theory about people who
use their ears more than their eyes, but it is nothing more than a
theory. In any event from my earliest days I always had two prize
possessions: a torch and a radio. I was a child in the '70s, there
were no games' consoles back then. To
this day, if I am at home, I have a radio on, in the car the
radio is on, and if I am walking I try not to listen to a radio,
lest I get run over, but even here if there is a test match
underway I will have one earphone 'tuned into' TMS. My
first experiment is one
I can remember clearly and I can even give the time and date -
approx 16.45 on
Saturday 1st June 1974. Not because I am a meticulous recorder of details,
rather because it turned out (coincidentally) to have been during
a major event.
I was on holiday at my granddad's house up in the Peak District.
He had an FM receiver which could be tuned above the broadcast
band. In those days the police transmitted here and it was simplex
and duplex unencrypted FM as I remember. So it was not unknown for
people to casually listen to activity in the local neighbourhood
as experienced by the law. I believe this is still the case in
some states of USA where they have ideas about citizens' rights to
monitor. Here I suspect I was breaking some law or other. Being
quite young I did not know, or care. I just wondered what would
happen if I connected the TV antenna to the input of my granddad's
FM receiver. I did so and that was the moment I suspect I became a
radio amateur.
At, more or less, the moment I connected the TV antenna to the
radio (correlation
does not imply causation as my philosophy tutor used to say) a massive
explosion took place some tens of miles away. It meant that police
forces from many counties were called out to the emergency. This
in turn meant lots of radio activity. I do not know if the TV
antenna brought in a stronger signal, I suspect it was likely the
braid of the coax as much as anything else thinking about it - my
granddad's house was
about 1000ft ASL - as I cannot remember the connection
details, or the type of TV antenna etc. What I do know is I soon
had an audience of my grandparents and parents all listening to
the unfolding disaster. This was in the days before Internet, or
24 hour rolling news. Flixborough
became infamous in the days after, yet it was some hours before it made the
evening news.
As a boy it was an awesome thing to have known about such an event
long before anyone else. Of course I had no understanding of the
horror unfolding on that
day - the day I became a radio 'ham'.
Since then I eventually took my RAE followed by CW Test and gained
the callsign G0MJI. I did not choose the callsign it was the one issued at the time I
applied. Neither have I thought about changing it for one more
exotic as I believe is the trend at the moment. It isn't the most
elegant in CW either --. ----- -- .--- .. but it is mine.
I believed when I took the test that it was a gateway to radio
experimentation and self-education. I love building antennas and finding out what propagation
will do with them. Perhaps it goes back to that fateful
day. Whatever, with the new data modes there has never been a
better time for an amateur experimenter - or 'Gentleman Scientist' as I
jokingly tell my kids, who only like 'gaming' and cannot see the
point. I have a small plot, many neighbours, lots of local RF
noise, yet still
I get to try new things. That for me is what Amateur Radio is
about. And these pages record some of the things I have tried.
Bri, G0MJI,
October 2017
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