Having passed the City and Guilds of London Institute Radio Amateurs' Examination May - June 1981 I was licenced as a Class B UK Amateur Radio Station G6EXC, on 10 September 1981. I operated an FT290R initially into a Jaybeam 4 element Quad on 2 metres. My favourite was working USB, tropo and aurora into Western Europe. I heard 'E' but never managed to work it! I later borrowed my brother's IC260E, which had a better front end (whilst he was in Saudi Arabia earning megga bucks) and upgraded the antenna to a
On 26 September 1983 I passed my Morse Test and was granted my Class A UK Amateur Radio Licence, G4UVB, on 5 October 1983. I sold my FT290R to pay for my brand spanking new FT102 + FC102 + SP102 line up. I had every form of HF wire aerial you could fit into a 30 feet back garden!
The usual marriage thing happened and the computer revolution began to happen. In fact it was a Sinclair ZX81 morse generator that taught me morse code, complete with a wobbly 32Kb RAM pack. Progressed to an Osborne 01 in 1983 and Amstrad PC1512 after that. Then came the 486 DX33, DX66, Pentium Pro 200, AMD Athlon 750, XP2000, duel Athlon MP2400 (which is old of course) and current duel core Athlon processor. To be honest I'm losing track of the numbers as they all seem to do much of a muchness these days.