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This section of my web site deals with hardcore radio matters. So if you get upset at the site of a naked receiver with its frequency synthesiser hanging out for all to see, then click here to get back to Google... or read on, as you wish.
I have had a long association with radio, becoming interested at a very young age- my earliest recollection was that of playing with an old domestic set at my grandmothers when I was probably less than ten years old. I remember vividly two things about it- one was the sight of the big red-coated octal valves glowing away that you got by peering through the slots in the back cover, and the wonderful and strange sounds that emanated from it on 'Short Wave'- Morse code, foreign voices, and strange burbling noises all seething in and out like the waves on the shore. This was pure magic, and I was probably hooked for life right there and then.
My parents supported my interests, and by 14, I was constructing working radios and two years later I had built a communications receiver using valves, and numerous transistor projects. And here and now I will apologise to those who queued inside (and sometimes outside) Bardwell's radio shop on Sellers Street, Sheffield in the early 1970's while some spotty youth ordered hundreds of components one by one; for I actually was that spotty youth. But it was about this time that my particular interests in the field developed, partly from listening on the air; for that early magic of the short waves was never lost for me. If happen to be in a nostalgic mood, I just listen to the sounds of the Stasi 'Gong' Station on Simon Mason's web site, and I am right back there in my bedroom as a teenager tuning about and trying to make sense of this wonderful new world that lay, invisible, beyond the antenna wire.
The other interest I developed was in VHF and I built super-regenerative receivers to listen to the PMR traffic on 'lowband' around 85 MHz. It was one day, while tuning around on this, that I heard a couple of engineers talking to each other as they carried out tests on a radio system, using the callsign 'Pye Service'. I remember listening to this and thinking, 'that's what I want to do. That is what I want to do.'.
The long and the short of it is that I did indeed do that, with Pye and then Philips- 15 years of it in fact, before redundancy forced a move on to pastures new. A further 15 years has now passed, providing radio communications in the public sector, and I wouldn't have missed a minute of any of it. Here's to the next 15...
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