Hi,  I’m Alan, I am a professional Electrical & Electronics enginneer, and I live in the UK near Derby.

I have been interested/involved with radio since about the age of 8 when my uncle helped me build a crystal radio set, and with my pocket money, I bought the Ladybird book “How To Build A Transistor Radio” by a guy called George Dobbs. After building this (brilliant idea, using brass screws and countersink washers to trap the leads of the components against a piece of wood), and spending a lot of time getting it going…. I was hooked on anything related to radio.

With the event of CB radio in the UK at the end of the 70’s (allbeit illegal at that time), I discoverd SSB and “skip”, and the ability to talk to people thousands of miles away from my own bedroom. Living a somewhat sheltered life in a small villiage out in the country, some of the places I could hear people talking from, I had only ever heard of on the news.

I became more interested in the technical side of things, and enjoyed building add-ons and test gear such as speech-processors, audio & rf signal generators (not as difficult as it sounds when you have a good supply of broken rigs to canibalise and modify) andI did a lot of repairs and mods for the local CB operators.

I drifted away from radio after passing my driving test, and discovering girls and beer. I tried other hobbies, but as time progressed, I realised that I still got a buzz from listening to people miles away, and then trying to talk to them. So I landed back on 11metres.

After deciding that I needed a decent call-sign, I joined the FreeBand DX group, and this became the basis of this website. I am interested in all sorts of radio, legal and otherwise, I like to build my own bits and antennas, and I am hoping that this will be reflected in the content on this blog.

Alan

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