G7VYH

I wrote in 1977 (age 15) in a piece of schoolwork entitled letter writing that I was joining an Amateur Radio club as I had put my name down for it at school.  In fact it was 4 or 5 years earlier we were using the Kings Lynn Radio club Portacabin for doing such learning tasks as very much juniors age 10 or 11 years old we had been asked if we would like to one evening a week use the club facilities and I had accepted.

It was as a junior the club allowed us to build Vero board oscillators and look at the kit in the shack and solder etc.  I was a very ordinary child at the time and not greatly understanding of the Radio stuff going on around us with all the Heathkit stuff on the shelves with big dials and a lot of hiss and crackle but I'm glad we had the opportunity and now at 61 years old and 51 years soldering and using such handskills I hope I'm just about as good as I ever was.

Alas in 1997 with the advent of real internet availability I bombed out of Radio and also the BletchleyPark Radio Club (been a member for a couple of years hence the G7 callsign) where we had not long just set up the radio room in what was then the early days of the original radio station part of the newly opened museum and really nothing to do with the current one alas.

My only claim to fame - my top level Amateur Radio skillset was I offered and took a sledgehammer to a wall at Bletchley Park in the Radio Room in the original museum to make a walkway with wheelchair ramp access so you could pass from one room into another without going back into the corridor.  The old museum no longer exists.

I'm still interested in radio and still commercially working in electronics but don't let that last part of it put you off as Radio is a love of mine over and well beyond what I do in my working day always will be regardless of if I am or am not selling or working with electronics.

I also recently realised that I am only a couple of  miles away from the house where  Louis Varney (G5RV) designed and set up the Original G5RV antenna in his back garden.  He never prospered a penny from that but many others to follow certainly did until this very day also.

73s all of you

Mike

G7VYH