I was born back in 1951 in Southampton, and went to school in various places, the last being Battisbough Hse, nr Plymouth. I spent some time at sea in the Merchant Navy, then joined the Royal Navy. luckily leaving before the Falkands War In 1973 I married Sue, and took my Radio Amateurs exam in 1974. After working in the electronics industry for about 10 years , I went back to college and on to what is now the University of the West of England, better known as Bristol Polytechnic. My engineering career progressed through most of the Cellular Telecoms companies and RF instrumentation manufacturers, both in the UK and mainland Europe. We have two sons Nigel and Keith and we lived in Swindon for many years, then moved to near Stroud for a year, and then moved up to Telford in Shropshire where we live now. Keith lives in Shrewsbury, Shropshire and Nigel and his family in SE Essex. I used to enjoy hill walking and some climbing, as well as some mountain biking, however my balance is so poor now I need the whole path or road to myself, caused by the surgical removal of an acoustic neuroma. Access to the tumour was destructively through the inner ear. I'm retired now which leaves more time to continue my interest in Ham Radio, especially VHF and microwave activities. Sue and I were divorced in 2021
We have had cats and dogs as pets while the two boys were growing up, and when we moved to Telford the last of our pets , a little black cat called Liquoricepassed away, she was 13 years old . We then had our first male cat, Sam, different ! , not cuddly but very loving , click here for a picture of him. Sam was 17 years old when he died last year, 2012, and I missed having a cat so much, that we went to the cat rescue centre at Shrewsbury and came back with Hector. Hector is very different from Sam very affectionate, in to everything, and follows me everywhere. He's already showing an interest in radio, here he is examining the cooling fan in the Local oscillator module in the microwave IF transceiver. However, on 2nd June 2014 hector was hit by a car on a nearby road, we were both devastated by the loss. We have never had a little friend who was so loving, Sadly missed.
But, we went again to the Shropshire Cat Rescue and found a little black female, who had just lost her home as she had a litter of kittens. She very loving. but so far does not come on to our laps like Hector did, she young , we think less than 2 years old, so still in to everything and enjoying her freedom. She was in the rescue centre for 8 weeks.
We have made very good Friends with Buck and Kathy , Buck has helped considerably over the past few years with the control software for my two homebrew rigs. We both have similar VFO projects using the WD6DHW AD9912 DDS , he has built a HF transceiver based around the DDS VFO. Buck held a Ham licence in the 1960's , but let it lapse due to pressure of work. Unfortunately the lapse was before the FCC "grandfather rules", so he resat the Technician and General Ham licence exams in 2012 and now holds the call sign KD8RRI. Buck and Kathy live in Southern Ohio. Sadly Buck passed away in September 2015, he will be missed as his help was invaluable and was a very good friend.
Buck spent much of his time building a mutiband HF transceiver, based on the R2PRO and T2PRO boards available from KANGA US,br /> He also used the WD6DHW AD9912 DDS board for the VFO, but as he needed more IO lines to control the separate LNAs and transmit sections he expanded the control lines , as the R2PRO use I&Q mixing he used the complementary outputs and used high speed dividers to get the quadrature VFO output for the mixers. All the details , schematics , notes and software for this transceiver are in the files section for download. 1 GHz Clock Source.pdf LO- AD9912.pdf LO- Aux Control.pdf LO Control & LCD Wiring.pdf LO- Quad Gen-1.pdf LO- Quad Gen-2.pdf LO S-P Interface.pdf R2Pro_9912_3q.asm (use "save link as") R2Pro Comments.txt R2Pro Documentation Package.pdf