About Me.
If you've arrived here by accident then this website will appear quite incomprehensible. It's dedicated to some stuff regarding my radio and electronics activities associated with my OFCOM radio licence .
Purpose
4. The Licensee must ensure that the Radio Equipment is only used:
a) for the purpose of self-training in radio communications, including conducting technical investigations
I'm typically fascinated by anything technical, investigative and hate to leave any question unanswered, be it radio, computing or materials, and believe in lifelong learning. Most activities on here describe my experiments with something called QRSS, a method of sending extremely slow Morse code to enable a 100x boost in the recovery of the transmitted information, meteor scatter experiments or probing the Ionosphere with home made equipment (see QRSS rigs etc). I am also known for using more traditional hand sent Morse for chatting around the world with a small transmitter for fun. (Yes, Morse is massively used even today). I have not had a traditional home station for many years now, so it's unlikely that you'll hear me calling unless I am operating portable occasionally.
I've played on all bands from the 630m band to 23cm using most modes. and some 136Khz listening. SWL from about 1977 listening to all the old style short wave propaganda broadcasts, something that the youngsters wouldn't understand these days with the internet and iphones etc. It was a different world back then. You needed to be there to understand how the world was in those days, sadly most folk are no longer about to know how it felt. We had two and half TV channels, and pretty much all broadcasting stopped before midnight. 405 line VHF was still used. CD players were yet to be invented, as was home computers. Posh people might have a microwave oven ! And yet just about every radio in the home had shortwave in addition to long wave, medium wave and the new fangled FM band. Shortwave was important back then! Hardly anyone these days has heard of it. It's hard to use, low quality and requires technical knowledge. It's now only confined to enthusiasts who understand it.
I have written for Practical Wireless, SPRAT journal, NMR mag, and appeared in CQ magazine (US) in a QRP special edition for an FT817 home made accessory project. I also compile and publish a group magazine called "74!" which caters for specialist low power propagation beacon interests. Alternative link here.
Here's a few pictures of myself whilst doing some R&D work with smart antennas (diversity switching) based at the University of Kent in about the year 2000. I also designed the original planar diversity antenna for the Volvo XC90. Sorry about the quality of the pics. They were taken with what was at the time a cutting edge digital camera (about 1 Megapixel) and was printed in some old paper documentation. I had to scan them to make the JPG's for this website. I think modern XC90's since Chinese investment use a different system now, nothing to do with the Mk1 series circa 2001.
My other website (old school and perfunctory) can be found at www.qsl.net/g0ftd/grabber.htm and is used for my QRSS grabber when active, and a small file repository. (A grabber is like an electronic chart recorder that monitors radio signals and then sends the data back to the website for public viewing). The data is used by enthusiasts studying ionospheric events and requires specialist knowledge to understand them.
Note - Are you a Kiwi RX owner searching for my callsign ? We QRSS operators sometimes use a remote Kiwi RX to supplant or monitoring operations. We operate in a 200Hz segment just below the WSPR frequencies. So if you see us connected to your system we are not wasting bandwidth / duplicating the inbuilt WSPR decoder system.We are using the audio feed to be sent to a visual "chart recorder" to see our signals, known as grabbers. QRSS is a totally different mode that operates immediatly below the WSPR freqs, so please don't get confused.
On this Google site I have made use of my Misc Pics sections to provide some thought and inspiration about other activities and projects rather than attempt to create a new page for each one (they would end up being quite short and boring),. They also document the small things that I observe in life that often get missed out by others. So I let my pic collection do the talking.
My webpages are often updated but it's easy to miss them. I often (in the name of perfection) change a line or two to reflect newly gained knowledge, These are subtle but important. If you read a page last month then it's wise to re-read it again. You MUST use your reading skills to gain the information that I present here. Small changes are important changes.
You are free to rip off my website for personal use only, Use wget.
The command wget -mpEk https://sites.google.com/view/andy-g0ftd/home for all pages except external links, including stuff to my Gdrive for example. You need to grab that stuff manually for now. Note thecase of the command. Once agin, feel free to grab anything you see here or on my qsl.net pages. Go get it, no server lasts forever !
Also please note that I am NOT a Windows user, and all a lot of info on this web site assumes that you are a Linux user who is familiar with the commands and ethos of the system. Take care not to mislead yourself.