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At the tender age of 10 (born 1943), I became
fascinated with radio when my father finally bought a radio set. What a
miracle in the house now, from out of nothing and everywhere came
wireless music and voices! But already at this young age, I was puzzled
at a phenomenon noticed on the MF band at the higher frequency scale.
During the evening hours something strange happened: the signal would
exhibit a fading and reduction of the sound volume. My mother called it
“blowing away” like a wind can do. No one I asked had an answer for me
at this time. Later this all became clear, it had something to do with
propagation properties.
At
the age of 12 I build my very first radio “crystal” set. Fascinating by
this wonder of no power consumption I wanted to know more about radio
in general. I enrolled to a technical course by postal correspondence
about radio techniques. By the age 13, I started doing repairs at every
opportunity on defective radio sets of neighbors and relatives. All the
more I wondered about “how do those radio signals get into the air”?
After
a long search (1960), I was able to locate literature and a book about
the exciting radio amateur hobby. Shortly after, I became a member of
the UBA (Union Belgium Amateurs) and helped by the members, I started
studying transmitting theory and CW. At one of the weekly club CW
sessions I met another CW student who lived only one mile from my home
without knowing each other. We became friends and decided to study
together the necessary electronics theory and practicing CW at his
home.
We both passed the exams and got our license in April 1961. My friend
got the call sign ON4UN and I got ON5AU and we stayed close friends for
ever since.
After finishing high school radio electronics, I worked as a radio and
TV repair technician in a local company. In 1974 I became interested in
microprocessors, microcomputers and computer programming, (Assembler,
Basic, and Pascal). During that same year I started working at the Bell
Company Belgium, as a maintenance technician for their CNC machines.
Fifteen years later, I became a field repair technician in a company
specialized in the manufacture of microprocessor-controlled attendance
registration and access control terminals.
From
the start as radio ham, I was always interested in the know-how of
antennas and most of my antennas were and still are home brew, such as
cubical quads, Yagis, delta loops, multiband dipoles, ground plains,
etc. Any article or column in ham magazines were read, studied and
collected. My bookshelf contains about 100 titles explaining antennas
in general and in depth and a lot of CD's, DVD’s and USB sticks contain a
huge collection of antenna related books and QST, QEX,
Ham Radio and 73 Magazines.
However,
in the nineties antenna modeling programs for the PC came available.
from this early stage, I purchased EZNEC and updated to every new
version. From the beginning these programs were a real revelation to
explore antenna properties, performance
and working know-how. With a few data inputs, keystrokes and mouse
clicks it was possible to compute and visualize the antenna model
radiation properties impedance and much more.
After
early retirement in the summer of 2000, I had more time to pursue my
interest in the hobby of amateur radio and increase my knowledge of
propagation and antenna theory and techniques. At April 2002 I started
with writing a monthly column about “Radio Wave Propagation”
for the online magazine AntenneX. This series ended in June 2009 but
was the start for another series of columns named “Practical
Antennas” till October 2016, the moment AntenneX suddenly stopped
publishing. Writing about antenna modeling and techniques of how to do,
should have been the next series of columns and was already in a
preparatory stage. So, I decided to do it in printed book form.
Other
hobbies are photography, reading, traveling, gardening and of course QSO’s mainly on HF. Thus, a busy bee!
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