Today, the 1st of January 2026, it is exactly 50 years ago when my initial VHF licence became valid. The picture below shows a copy the initial licence (which I no longer have). We had to return documents to the administration when a licence was changed, which happened in 1977 after the CW test was… Continue reading »
A bit like the fashion for middle aged men, my good old Hewlett Packard 8568B got new clothes. In my opinion, it is one of the masterpieces of Hewlett Packard spectrum analyser design. Even today, the specifications are hard to beat with new equipment in the “amateur price” range. I will return to that. The… Continue reading »
For some time, I suffer from tremendous interference from various sources. The worst one is LED lighting which generates very strong interference in the 50 MHz band. I wanted to see what the interference would be like we still had analogue television. We used to have CCIR system B on VHF and the channel 2… Continue reading »
Over time, items were added to the inventory of measurement instruments. But it all started with some simple things, because professional instruments were way out of reach at the time I was licensed in 1976. We had to cope with uncomplicated equipment to be able to “guesstimate” what we were doing. The grid dipper One… Continue reading »
Last week an electrolytic Capacitor had failed in a 70’s measuring instrument (HP 8445B preselector). The capacitor in question is a smoothing capacitor in the power supply assembly. It stopped smoothing, but shorted the whole supply out. Poof, fuse blown. Thank goodness for that! Not much time that moment, so something for the next day…. Continue reading »
There were times when there was only one type of amateur radio licence. One had to pass a technical exam and a Morse code test, because telegraphy was the standard operation mode. Later on, a separate licence became available without the Morse test and only gave access to VHF and up. My first exam was… Continue reading »
This weekend, the VLF station in Grimeton was having an Alexanderson day. On Sunday June 30th, two transmissions were announced. Although I read about the station several times and watched various YouTube videos, I never tried reception myself. On Saturday, I tested a number of wire antennas that were connected to a USB sound interface,… Continue reading »
During last winter, I have been very busy with the process of buying a second home in France. For several years, this was in the making and last November, the decision was made to acquire an old farm in the department Haute-Marne, about midway between Nancy and Dijon (grid square JN27). From my home in… Continue reading »
Recently, I scanned some pictures and I though it was nice to share them here. Four of them are of the VHF/UHF/SHF contest station that we ran between 1981 and 1987. The first location was abandoned because of blocking trees. The latter location was on top of a school building with a superb take-off. We… Continue reading »
Below, an annotated picture of my antenna setup, taken in 1992 (click on the photo to enlarge). Some years later, I moved to a different QTH and unfortunately, I did not have the opportunity to put up the mast again:-(