Well here goes !!!

Well here goes !!! - Thought I would start a blog to record my adventures in radio especially the repair and reviving of transceiver's that I have collected or gained via various forms (mostly eBay!) - trying to recapture all the things I wanted to own as a I grew up !! you know Heathkit - Ten Tec - Yaesu - all those things you couldn't afford early life, then families and responsibilities come along.......

A little background first - 

I have been interested in how things work for as long as I can remember, and so I guess it was a natural thing when I asked my parents how radio worked. They in desperation sent me next door (how lucky was that !) to a wonderful radio ham called Fred (G3YMQ as I recall, now SK) who was remarkably patient and understanding. He let me use his radio's to listen to all those places far away (I remember the day he purchased an FT-101ZD) and we set it up together, simply wonderful.

Thanks to his patience and encouragement I got really interested in electronics and this led me to a career, via the Civil Aviation Authority training at Bletchley Park (yes enigma an all that) I lived there for two years or so really learning about electronics, radio, then posted to Heathrow airport, then a while later to get into management and 27 years or so (!) later via electronic design, firmware, computers, service management, WAN design, BPO, IT Security into (currently) the Senior Civil Service, working at - well don't think I'll go that far just yet - we hardly know each other !!!

Anyway - I have many projects on the go so I will start to list them over the next few weeks and hopefully record and provide some useful notes on the approaches I used to bring them back to life again !!!

I'm also pretty active on HF from home (at the weekends as i'm pretty bust during the week) - (mostly 7Mhz / 17Mhz / 50 Mhz / 70 Mhz + 2M + 70CM) and so might post on that activity as well as my plans for a new mast I'm planning and my HF antenna experiments.

73's for the moment - M1ABK

PS - Just noticed I've won something new on eBay - bet you can't wait !