history

This is my radio history !

(total text revision on 19)

This is my history in radio ,radio communications and other related aspects The text below was normally prepared to be used for Pop Comm for 1990 however it was never sent to them !

Using my fathers' Morse tutor , at an age of 6 months only!

  • 1962 :I was only half a year when my father, before going as a ship radio telegraphist, left in our house a Morse tutor. I liked to play with it! After some years when I was 6-8 I liked to use our old tube radio (with SW bandf) and playing with its buttons. The continuous trips my father with the ship. in the USA , Cuba and Japan and the records he bought from those far-away places, aroused my feelings about everything Japanese . At same time I enjoyed learning 'strange' languages such as Japanese. Litte more can be found on the interests webpage

  • 70 During high school , after buying my first SW radio type SILVER RT430 I enjoyed listening to AM and SW radio stations. I liked normally to listen to Radio Moscow's Chinese service because I liled to listen to Chinse language Very soon I used this radio to listen to strange music listening as e.g. Chinese, Hilife (afropop), Arab, Turkish etc. This was after 1972.

  • 75-78 I continued listening to SW radio during my high school studies and on 1976-8 I got connected with a Chinese friend working in the chinese pavilion in the Thesslaoniki trade Fair. He was a Greek philosophy student in the nearby University. This caused me an admiration in everything Chinese. At the same time with the co-operation of my French language teacher we prepared my first letter to R Beijing for my top frequency 7935kHz for awarding a QSL card . R Beijing as well as CNR 1/2 of the time ere my music partner when i read my school lessons.

  • 1980 I sent letters to R Pyongyang R Korea and to other Asian stations At the Same time started learning the English language in the while I was learning marketing studies . .However due to much QRM from RTTY stations in 7935, I was looking for ideas to reject the QRM, so I was a regular buyer of '73 Magazine ' from a local bookstore. Satellite systems attracted my interest and started sending letters to companies involved . it was a big disappoint to me that time that 20 m dishes were required

  • 1984 One of these companies added me to their magazine in "Satellite Orbit" magazine, international edition, received every month for many years. A public research was made in the marketing studies class asking around 35 people in a two page questionnaire

This was the company's business card in between 80s to 90s

All sensitive data are removed.

  • 1985-6 started designing and selling satellite antennas with a cousin. We were the first satellite antennas producer in Greece .The first reception on 85 was very successful in receiving Raduga’s OIRT channel little before the Chernobyl disaster. Systems were sold to many customers

  • 1985-6 my parents bought for me from Sharjah/ UAE the SONY ICF7600 D radio after a business trip in a exhibition of Greek products . I used this radio very much afterwards

  • 1988-89 The mayor of our city was the fist in Greece relaying news feeds from satellite programs as CW and BBC by a TVRO ordered from our company. Many other stations followed this idea by ordering satellite systems. One of these stations still continues to air not only the greek news feed from VoA but long music feeds from VoA’s music now! as program filler.

  • In the same time the committee managing the municipality radio was under a cat and mouse chase with police controlled by the Socialist Government due to their unofficial and irregular TV transmissions. Quite later , on 1989 they ordered a full terrestrial relay system of satellite TV for 5 satellite TV channels.

  • This action made many more mayors to invest in such systems especially in N Greece. In less then one year we installed three more systems at a big cost. The demand for home satellite system was dropped to nearly zero. Most antennas used for that time were still 3 meters in diameter to receive Hotbird or any other satellite

  • (1982-1989) All that time was focused in the satelute bsiness stopping shortwaves 1990 still Following an interest in utility stations I bought a small RTTY and a fax decoder from England for Spectrum a micro computer bought on early 80s. Tanjug was my top RTTY station with Xinhua as second.

  • The trip on 89 in the SEA raised my interest for listening to VoMalaysia in shortwaves on 15295 . That period VoM has good signals with two nearby powerhouses (±5KHz ) from Russia and France causing excessive interference in most times. The most important is that their program was consisted with music for more than 80% if its airing time

  • 1992/3 IN a two months leisure and satellite TV installation trip in N Nigeria I used my fellow's ICOM 530 transceiver ,a Yaesu transceiver and an old analog Sharp radio tape recorder for DXing . Sharp was then used primarily for recording music from the Vo Malaysia and Yaesu for logs . All the logged stations have been sent by letter to Mr Garry Dexter in behalf of Pop Comm magazine. This was my first DX-pedition ever !

· I continued sending reports to Mr Dexter also from my home in Thessaloniki until 93

· IN behalf of a local journalist and a transmitter technician we started a TV channel in Katerini, a city 60 km South of Thessaloniki, called TV Pieria. Katerini is a city of 80000 inhabitants .This channel supposedly had great success in the city and nearby places, with a reception distance of 50 km In contrast to other local stations which only shown movies or sat relays TV Pieria used blend of local news home productions movies and music. Plase visit the link above to read the whole story.

The experiment was unsuccessful . In just 8 months the channel was closed.

  • 92/93 Same time one reader of Pop Comm from my town Thessaloniki (!!!) and SWLer read my name in Mr Dexter's column and contacted me when iw was in N Nigeria .His name is Daniel and after this strange case we became good friends .Our houses were only 300 m far .......

  • Jan 93 I Daniel poposed me to become a member of World DX club.

  • Mid 93 Been again active in RTTY DX ing for abt 2 months with all the DX material being sent to Bob Margolis of 73 Mag and some news snippets to a local radio station . SPECTRUM was later of order, so I returned to SWLing and clandestine hunting .

  • start of 94 I started sending recption reports to radio stations (more than 100 SWBC stations , 60 utes - and 4 clandestines. and two folow ups ) resulting in a collection of 200QSL cards ..Signal from Malaysia got quite poor those times but the new Lowe HF150 did not helped either . Fortunately RRI#3 jakarta was transmitting for a short time on 9680 using a 500 kW transmitter with great signal. A few months later they were reverting to a 50 kW transmitter with poor signals. I was using the Lowe receiver connected with a pair of Sony Walkman mini speakers for better audio amd music .

  • 94 An MFJ 462 TTY reader bought directly from the company. There were many non technical troubles with them . It operated well in baudot modes, worse in CW, and even worse in ARQ and FEC modes:(

  • While the Lowe HF150 was used mainly for Utility DXing the Sony was used solely for radio monitoring

  • early 95 M first connection to Internet via a BBS for business purposes and news from Malaysia (berita-l) and later for shortwaves

  • Abt March 95: changed my ISP to Compulink. Pegasus (Winpmail) was my mail manager and Free Agent as the newsgroups manager.

  • In the mid 95 (Sep) I joined the following internet radio lists

rec.radio.shortwave

swl$l a special mailing list which is mirrored also in the r.r.s

hard core dx list

Cumbre ( after Obtober 95 )

WUN a special list for utes with nearly 700 -800 members from all over the world - the only ute list

DX Window (recently )

Gat flash!

  • 95 iw as more active in DXing, especially to hard core Dxing and tropical bands. Many new stations started that year especially after June

  • In May 96 I have bought the HF propagation handbook of Jacobs from which I have learnt many interesting things. A little later installed some propagation programs in my computer with VOACAP the best of all these.

  • 1997 passed with DX activity as I was focused in business and computing. From Sept same yers I was again logging for the DX lists . BY a way i joined the WWDXC by sending also to them my loggings . The mailing list arisen to 86 recipients. Latest DX book is the LA DXing#6.

  • Oh, on 97 i won a special QSL from a Greek pirate Eroticos

My shack in the parents house on mid to end 90s .

From left to right: Philips 2395 digital radio (over a storage heater), a Sony mini loudspeaker, dot matrix printer , Sony ICF7600, SILVER analog all band radio with tape recorder , Aiwa Walkman in front of radio spaeker,

On the shelter many tapes with SW recs or from VoMalaysia . The monitor on the rack was used for the TV Pieria

UPDATE 2001

after marriage and change of house !

98 and 99 were nearly calm years for DX reports , instead of it being more active for the online newsletters (mostly) .Very minimal correspondence has been made , mostly on clandestines and European pirates. After wedding mid 98 i have left my parents house on the center of the city for living into a mountainous place with much quieter radio environment , A nearby 150 kV distribution electricity tower nearby the house, affects reception a bit .

The usage of new equipment/accessories from MFJ bought at end 98 assisted in better reception It consisted of an MFJ ATU , a preselector, a phsing unit with tweo antennas and a audio filter

The dual antenna phaser ha a minimal success on removing local noises and needs surgical process to do the best. Many other people from the distribution list possibly remember that 1999 was also the year of the update of the greek pirate list. It included more than 120 pirates from the North Greek region On 98 two small 3 and 6 m antennas were used over the small courtyard with very good reception On 99 they were replaced by with a slightly tilted 16m wire antenna between two buildings that did an even ‘better job‘

2000: ICOM replaces HF150.HF 150 is used as auxiliary

WRTH 98 and 99 and 2000 were the new book additions. Also Ferrel’s utility book was added together with Klingenfuss and Schimel’s on spy stations> Schimmels was fond in a local bookstore.

ILG data were hardcopied into a book binder for easy updating.The same was made with Cumvre WWDXC DX Widow and EDXP

Email listing added by Eramo’s Conexion digital and Taranto DX

  • 2001 Added computer interface to R75 at the end of year ,but seldomly used afterwards , and only in special cases of signal monitoring for logs . Two Hardware Computer upgrades! I was contributor to R Pakistan , CCBS radio Tapei Intl and EWTN with visual FTDM analysis (spectrum analysis )

  • Dario Monferini and Roberto Pavanelo was visited our city in Thessaloniki for few days . we invited them in our house for an unofficial DX summit One picture was uploaded long ago in Facebook . it was their second visit in our town. Their first time was on August 1995 afaik when we – myself and Daniel met him for the first time!

  • 2002 Big upgrade to computer RTTY modes. Bought the full version of RadioRaft 3.2 together with the interface from Pervisell, which worked very well. The PC was very clear from interfering R75

  • This is the year I started working in the University

  • Tested one thin wire dipole antenna of 13+ 14 meters with good results and much lower noise level over the main antenna for a couple of days.

  • Direct computer connection from the R75 for making recordings ( into MP3) from SW or for signal monitoring ( fading analysis ) .

  • Made a inverted V of 2x 16m with the hel[p of a technician who installed a motorized satellite TV antenna of 1.2 m .

  • Upgraded computer printout with Fine Print,

  • Added a few professional MP3 processing programs such as MP3 trim and MP3 Surgeon. Still my favorites

  • On end of December made a special article on clandestines stations via satellite whilch is hosted in cladestineradio.com.

  • Bought a digital camera Olympus C220 used in my trips to Lefkada and Litohoron for making simple DTP works in a friend's computer. This was one of the early stage of DSP cameras

  • Several e-booklets have already been uploaded to my site. MY collection of Heavy metal records was converted into MP3 and vinyl records sold for buying the first DVD player. Most of my other cassettes have been ripped previously starting on around 2000

  • 2003 : Made a survey on communications transmissions. Some 20+ years flashback into satellite antennas . A local power line noise destroyed my ability to listen to low power signals. It was very posile that the nearby powerlines caused it

  • 2004 : Transferred my account into OTENET the Greek National Telephony after the older company stopped abruptly witot notifying anoyone . 2 crashes of my computer due to networking module anomalies, one later due to unknown hard disk crash and another causing Win98 to modify the FAT .

  • Added Degen DE1102 to my radio collection making great logs

  • 2005 : Under continuous communication with Degen/Tecsun I added DE1103 , PL200 , DE808 models to my collection A further 2 copies of DE1102 have been given to beloved persons for better FM listening of several difficult FM stations. Also regained an interest in leaning more on SEA history.

  • 2006 . On June , the purchase of a Nikon D50 has helped me very much in making great photos , so that C220 camera has been used just for random use

  • On October i joined the blog site Multiply that was my main blog site since then. This was a proposal from a German friend weho has connextions with Indo people .Due to its architecture the radio logs were posted into the blog part, audio clips and malay music samples were posted in the audio part. Reviews part consisted with gadget and mp3 tech reviews.

  • On Nov of same year the analogue telephone line was upgraded into DSL with speeds up to 768 kbps

  • 2007 My parents have joined a Odeum in Litochoron , I was their 'official' photographer and cameraman. The Odeum welcame MR Vasilis Lekkas a known non-mainstream singer and a second class actor .Both is a friend of Mr Saltas the odium manager.

  • Part of the internet hobby is also news clipping and gathering. One of the subgroups includes and a technology bundle (with news breakthroughs in technology, software and other related).

  • ON JOn to aug 2007 i have made a special research for HDFM the American digital radio format

  • 2008 I joined Facebook . Several well known DXers have been found there and i connected with them .Also started using Blogspot.

  • With the odium we visited Athens for 3 days .

  • The news clipping added a new group with news from the file sharing area although I m against it! DSL speed has been upgraded from 768 to 1 Mbps

  • 2009 :New DSL upgrade to 2mB.

  • New photo camera is used as photo and video camera togetherafter the collapse of the previous , However 2008 and 2009 are mostly gadgets years.

  • Our baby was born on March 1st..

  • Much free time is used for internet radio listening mostly to radio Malaysia's stations But suddenly in end of Aug most capital stations stopped their service ...

  • 2010 Radio listening goes quite below the usual , as free time due to the baby is going shorter and shorter so that only do some interne basics.

  • An e reader replaces printing and reading. Some of the online time is also used for listening to RTM

  • 2011: Replaced my ISP into Forthnet, the oldest provider in Greece who also offers Nova the fist TV subscription service in Greece . The eBook become defunct twice and replaced with a new, called Mebook, bought via an Amazon seller.

  • 2012 and then. After two delays on 2012 Multiply suspended its operations on Jan 13 . two weeks were quite enough to transfer the material into Blogspot. Around 1 GB of data.

  • End of 2013 My first tablet from the local market with some minor problems on the start .

  • The same time new radios have been bought De1126 (mostly for audio recording) PL380 (for easy DXing ) DE108 (for on road listening ) and PL600 (for DXpedition ) Most of them later sold or given as i kept only the PL380

  • ON 2014 late August i started using a tablet to listen in clear the Malaysian music and news from various sources including RTM Sarwak The tablet stopped operating in les than 6 months but the company immediately replaced it with a newer model as it was in its warrantee .

  • Turbulences in the university made more than 800 people get fired as the contractor left the Uni. That happened in mid12. I was also one of them but still was on the city servicing my old parents and dong some selfwork in the Uni together . My wife’s work also ended later on May 14. An interesting book with remixed tales inspired me to make some remixes of the classical tales and add newer ideas as time passed. A few of the first stories were posted in their earliest form in zliangas.blogspot One of these stories was later reformed into a long series

  • ON end of Dec 2014 I have made a new e-book related to Malaysia radio and music 25 years of research, that has been published on end of Jan 2015 posted on Scribd but later removed due to very low demand. It is a hard copy of all postings on the older Multiply com site. This hard copy included many updates in all parts and new articles for a total 120 pages. A new update has been made on 2019 yielding to 190 pages. 2015 . Global tuners and Web sdr added to my ‘reception equipment ‘

  • 2016-2019 :ON April 19 in a sudden a dll program from the tablet was damaged itself by unknown error (RAM problem?)and shown a recurring message each time after pressing OK . Fortunately I solved the problem after a few restarts and keeping it indefinitely in hibernation and charging for around 5 months. It was used for 5+ years. The battery could last for around 2. Hours

  • More interest was using remote kiwi SDRs since 16 but more active on 19: better monitoring of remote signals or listening stations not even heard in my area

  • Got very active in Instagram posting more than 2500 photos in 18 months!

  • In the meantime i sold most of my radio gear . I kept only the 1103 the PL380 and the ICOM R75. Tested a friends Tivdio 115 a few days for a review with poor results and gave to her . A new 115 has been bought on 2019 but the efficiency was even worse Instead the Q3 recorder I boght in 16 for SW recordings and stream recs was much better . Useful for Malay music in radio. Another interesting was a ICR110 that is then sold to another friend.

  • Mid-19 After very long time of thinking and collecting the necessary money - around 12 months - i decided to replace the nearly dead tablet into a Lenovo i5 laptop. An RSP1a SDR was also added in the list together with some necessary accessories via ebay plus a few additions : 10 m extension to the dipole antenna and one VHF rhombic loop , made by wire. The programs added for using with RSP are SDR uno , HDSDR and Sharp. SDRConsole is my favorite and is updated regularly. Sigmira and Spectravue are also used in special occasions

  • on 20 I only replaced RSP1a with a Airspy HF+ Discovery that works much better in the lower bands. MY father hs died aftetr 2,5 yes fight with a multiple stroke in the end of year. A idea for antenna enhancement was not very fruitful. due to thie problem i was moving between my hoe and my parents home. Greece was the first and faster then all european countries in fighting wit the pandemic with the least human loss.