Scattered thoughts of a scatterbrained

Season's Greetings!

2011-12-23T13:17:00.001+02:00

It is darker here today at noon than in the middle of the night in midsummer!

I'm not kidding, It is unusually dark because we have very little snow this year and the sky is gray.

But the Christmas tree is spreading some light inside our livingroom.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

No. 3

2011-10-23T18:14:00.002+03:00

This is my masterpiece no. 3:

A Very Cherry Chocolate Cake I made for my birthday today.

Yum! It is the kind of cake that makes you gain a few pounds only by reading the recipe. :)

Another cold morning

2011-10-16T12:17:00.004+03:00

The weather has been really nice here the last few days, but the temperature drops down to several degrees below freezing point at night, so all the plants and trees are withdrawing into hibernation now.
But the frost gives nature a nice touch at sunrise.
The bright yellow and otherwise coloured spots are not hot pixels in my D90, they are miniature suns in the frost particles.

Bye,bye vegetables

2011-10-15T14:48:00.000+03:00

The vegetable growing season is definitely over today.
The thermometer stopped at -1.5 C at 2m. above ground this morning and the vegetables in our garden got literally frosted.

Very crispy and crunchy stuff I'd say... :)

Wood, autumn flowers and a lifesign

2011-10-09T12:42:00.001+03:00

Finally I've found some idle (LOL) time to create some input to this slowly expiring blog...
Below you will find one of the reasons for me being absent:

One evening Ingela came home and told me that our friends in another part of this village were cutting down some trees in their backyard and had promised them that we will take care of the trunks to use the wood in our fireplace. Well, these trunks turned out to be some 65 cm. (2 feet +) in diameter and there were plenty of them!
In the picture you see just a few of them but when they all were piled up aginst my garage wall, the pile was abut 1.5 m (5 feet) high and 4 m. (13 feet) long. Each piece was cut down to1.2 m long (4 feet) to fit across my trailer.
It was working most every evening and many weekends for five weeks to cut them to size and chop them into a neat pile of wood containing approx. 4 cu m. which will keep us warm at least one and a half winter.

The autumn has been rather warm, only a few outbreaks of frost, I was collecting the furniture away from our backyard yesterday, emptied the greenhouse from the tomato &c plants and water barrels. All is now set for the winter to come.
Much to my surprise I found some flowers at the southern wall of the greenhouse, a Musk-Mallow and a Garden Strawberry are obviously thinking that it is still summer, the later still trying to produce more berries!

On the front side of the house there is a still very healthy Water Avens:

And our lawn is invaded by Fieldfares, pulling worms out of the lawn:

The picture above is shot through three layers of glass, through a window, but still usable. I have traded in my Nikon D3000 for a used Nikon D90 and found a bargain Tamron 70-300 mm zoom-lens, the most of the pictures above are taken using that combination, edited and ehanched using Photoscape, the best free photo-editing sofware there is according to my opinion.

Our last teenager turned 19 yesterday

2011-07-17T20:34:00.000+03:00

Ian turned 19 yesterday and is here prepared to attack the cake.

Congratulations Ian!

20 years of GSM phone calls

2011-07-01T12:00:00.000+03:00

Today, 20 years ago Mr Harri Holkeri, then PM of Finland made the first official call in the first working digital GSM mobile phone network in the world, that of Radiolinja (nowadays Elisa) in Finland.
The call was made from a car, both parked and in motion. as described here.

Photo by Lehtikuva/Sari Gustafson

The first "handheld" GSM phone was the Mobira (later Nokia) Cityman,big as a brick and nicknamed "Shoephone" :

In Finland (in cooperation with the other Nordic countries) we already had an anlogue network called NMT, working on 450 MHz and later also at 900 MHz which in fact was reserved for digital communications already back then in the early eighties.

Those early "mobile" phones were big as military backpack radios and cost even more than the car that they usually were installed in.:)

The discussions in Europe regarding the upcoming digital mobile phone network went on for most of the eighties but in 1987 all the the standards and communication protocols for the new digital mobile network were in place and the rest is history.

Many of my friends who knew me as a radio communications Geek wondered why I never jumped on the NMT-900 bandwagon which allowed for really neat handheld analogue phones in the beginning of the nineties but as I knew what was waiting round the corner I did not make my move until 1994 when I bought my first real cell phone and it was a digital GSM phone of course. A Motorola 5200

The price was then 3400 FIM or 570 EUR which would be something in excess of 1000 EUR today taking the inflation into account! Horrible... But I could send and receive text messages, the problem was that there wasn't anybody I knew to send messages to until Ingelas' mom bought one. :)

Today you get a top of the line Iphone for the same amount of money and you can be online surfing the web nearly everywhere in the world!

Subtropical weather for some days now resulting in a violent thunderstorm as I write and this afternoon I'm going on summer holidays for four weeks! Yay!

Ian

2011-06-06T11:43:00.001+03:00

Our youngest son, Ian, graduated from High School last Saturday!

From left to right: me, Lukas, Ian, mom

Mother's Day

2011-05-08T20:29:00.000+03:00

Above you see (some of) Ingela's gifts for Mothers Day 2011.
The greenhouse got finished around noon today and we celebrated it in there with a glass of bubbly.
The cake has a story of its own. Some weeks ago we were watching the Swedish version of "Master Chef" and that cake was one of tests in the semifinals and I (silly me...) opened my big mouth and said something like "that doesn't seem so complicated, I'll make you one for Mother's Day..."
Well... it's a Schwarzwald Cake (Black Forest Cake) or at least a Swedish version and it wasn't that easy...
But it was yummy anyhow although I'm certainly not anything close to a Master Chef. :)

It has been a warm and sunny day, Ingela's mother visited us, we grilled salmon and vegetables and enjoyed my cake as a dessert.
Hope you are all well out there!

Alive and a new project

2011-03-18T13:34:00.000+02:00

Well... blogging is not my preference no:1 nowadays but a life sign now and then won't harm I think.
The winter seems endless this year, we have had bouts of snow and outbreaks of cold lately, last Tuesday morning the temperature was down to -17 C when I left for work. A lot of ships are stuck in the ice of the Gulf of Bothnia and the icebreakers are working 24/7
But the light is back, the sun is rising a little bit more every day and we have temperatures exceeding 0 C regulary every afternoon when it's not cloudy.
The return of the sun brings inspiration and that Pete Townshend vinyl I found last month triggered me to bring out my moms old record player from the garage into the house and take a look at it as my old turntable left the house along with Lukas last year.

The record player-tuner-amplifier combo is a HEA Stereo 3040 FM from 1974 and the interesting part is the turntable itself, a Lenco L78, made in Switzerland, built like a tank and virtually indestructable, the platter itself weighs close to 4 kg and the rubber mat close to 1 kg! There is an overdimensioned squirrel cage shielded pole motor inside, big enough to rotate a big hammer drill. The tonearm is not any top of the line SME or Decca but it is not far from those. In the headshell sits a decent cartridge from Pickering, a XV-15/625E

Said and done, I gave it a test drive some weeks ago, the turntable worked OK but the sound was unbalanced, faint and crappy.

As the amplifier specified as 2x15 Watt RMS at 8 ohm is a typical solution for the seventies it was not hard to track down the problems, some dried out electrolytic capacitors had to be changed, the idle current and voltage symmetry to be adjusted. As the final touch I changed the 6" woofers in the speaker boxes to new ones with huge magnets and converted the boxes to bass reflex boxes.

Now there is sound enough... :)

This is going to be an intermediate solution though, the Lenco L78 is going to be tweaked and tuned to perform even better and will get a new solid undercarriage and the amplifier will be disposed off and replaced with a tube amplifier, maybe a single ended class A solution 2x20w using KT 88:s or Russian GU 50:s

When all this is going to happen is another issue...

UFO:s spotted or how I learned to clean the sensor

2011-02-26T14:28:00.006+02:00

A while ago Ingela started to complain about some Unidentified Flying Objects that showed up in her pictures taken with the D300 every once in a while. Upon investigating the causes I found out that the cause must be dust specs on the sensor. Well not on the sensor itself, but on top of the IR and Low-Pass filter on top of the sensor.
I searched for a clean brush, put the camera in sensor cleaning mode and started sweeping the filter.
Well... I got rid of the original dust specs, but introduced a lot of new ones instead.. Aarggh!
After 30 minutes of sweeping my dust-tracking photo looked like this:

It looks terrible, doesnt' it? The picture is created by photographing an even grey surface at close distance with a zoom lens zoomed to 200 mm and manually focused to infinity and at the smallest possible aperture, in this case f: 32.

In real life, the only dust specs you can spot were the two big ones in the upper-mid part of the picture and they would start to emerge at apertures above f:11 and the smaller spots at f:16 to f:22.

Photographing could continue with some limitations like apertures below f:11, if possible, and arranging pictures so that even surfaces like walls or the sky would not coincide with the dirtiest parts.

In the meantime I ordered some cleaning equipment from here: Micro-tools in Germany (yes this stuff can be found in Finland as well, but at twice the price) and found this eminent website: www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com where one can find all the information one needs to successfully clean one's sensor.

When the stuff arrived I went to work with good confidence and after two rounds of sweeping using "the Wet Method" my dust picture looks like this:

Great improvement indeed. The remaining dust specs seen in the picture are so small that they will hardly show up in any picture unless the aperture is smaller than f:22 and they happen to coincide with an even surface.

When I started to search for dust in the D300 I found out that the Dust Removing (shaking the filter at start and shut down) feature was shut off and has so been since we bought this camera! It is now turned on! :)

We have been suffering low temperatures for the last two weeks, but today it is slightly above zero! Yay!

Pete as a decoration piece

2011-01-26T11:59:00.000+02:00

It seems that Ingela and I have differing views of how to use Pete Townshends album "All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes"...:)

It all started last Sunday when Lukas and I went to the yearly vinyl record fair in Vasa. I was browsing through a big box of unsorted albums, 3 EUR each, when I bumped into this album in a very good condition, removing the record out of the inner sleeve I couldn't find any scratches whatsoever. To me it seemed unused.

So I immediately bought it of course. This bargain spurred my thoughts onward to start searching for "White City" but I spent another 1 1/2 hours searching for that one without luck.

When I came home and showed the record to Ingela she immediately snatched it out of my hands, thanked me for this nice piece of decoration and installed on a shelf in her office!

Well, I must admit that it looks very good there alongside withe the quotation from "Baba O'Riley".

The inner sleeve containing the record is though stored in my collection of vinyls. :)

In the meantime we have got a lot more of this bloody white stuff we love so much... Not!

Well it makes the surroundings brighter and is rather decorative as you see. But when you have to clean your driveway repeatedly and it makes your biking rough you get tired of the stuff.

The picture is shot across the street from our kitchen window last Sunday.

And the temperature plunged down to -23 C again today.

The tealights are keeping us warm and cosy though!

Snowday

2011-01-19T11:37:00.001+02:00

Arrggh...! This is what we woke up to this morning.

Mother nature decided to suddenly dump another 12 inches of snow upon us overnight.

No biking today. Ingela gave me a lift to work after we had worked for 1/2 hour to clear our driveway and get the car out of the garage.

Photo of our front entrance by Ingela

Our R&R son Lukas is 20 today!

2011-01-17T14:05:00.001+02:00

He was born the very same day that George Bush Sr. launched operation Desert Storm .

Happy Birthday!

...and A Happy New Year!

2010-12-31T11:03:00.000+02:00

Photo by Ingela

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-23T16:20:00.000+02:00

Merry Christmas to everybody in Blogland! We installed our Christmas tree some days ago, and all the gifts are there waiting.
-26 degrees C this morning and a crisp and clear day.

My mom would have turned 90 today

2010-12-07T08:34:00.002+02:00

My mom was born this day in 1920. She died June 21, 2009.
The society changed rapidly during her lifetime, she was born when there was no radio, no TV, the first telephones had been installed in the village, everybody walked or used horse carriage, some bicycles there were but that was all. The boats were propelled by sails or by rowing, no electricity (the village was connected to the national grid after I was born!) the water had to be carried in, no central heating... the list of what we take for granted nowadays could be a mile long.
She saw the modern society grow into what it is today, with its' pros and cons, she saw the WW2, she saw the man walk on the moon. She saw it all...

Let me...

2010-11-29T11:57:00.002+02:00

...introduce you to Woodrose, a new local band that has been practicing together this autumn and made their first performance in the beginning of November at a private party in a small venue not far from here.

This live version of "You Oughta Know" is one of the best I've found on the YouTube.
Er.. I may be slightly biased because my son, Lukas, is in the band, together with my prototype amplifier and 4x12 speaker cabinet... :)
He is on rhytm guitar and also alternating on vocals:

The winter is embracing Europe, we got some more snow yesterday and it was -21 C when I left for work this morning.

I am not hibernating...

2010-11-14T18:37:00.002+02:00

...though I haven't updated my blog since September. I have just been straight out busy!
I started a greenhouse project in September as I told in my latest updates, There was a lot of old windows stored at my moms' house and I brought them here instead of scrapping them. I built a frame on a solid foundation made of 10 cm of concrete with frost insulation below and it is now standing there covered with plastic tarps, waiting for the spring to come when I will install the renovated and painted windows. Pictures of the progress below:

Then Ingela decided to throw out the old table from the living room and ordered a new one from me according to her own specifications:

For the moment I'm upgrading Ingelas computer because all this heavy blogging and picture editing is taking its toll on the old one. The new one will include an energy saving Xeon L3426 4-core Hyperthreading CPU, an energy saving graphics adapter Radeon HD5450 from ATI, 2x 500 GB silent WD Caviar Green in fail-safe RAID1 configuration, silent fans (the CPU has no fan at all...) and a silent PSU. On top of this 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate with a virtual XP to take care of old software that would not work in a 64-bit Windows 7 environment.

In the meantime we have got an outbreak of winter here, the temperature has plunged to -8 C in the beginning of last week and at the end of this week it will go there again. 10 cm of snow on the ground.

Update:

2010-09-28T11:12:00.000+03:00

Yes, I'm alive and well but seriously occupied for the moment. I've been excavating a part of our garden and built a foundation for a greenhouse to be completed next spring. The major ingredients in this project is a lot of old windows that were scrapped and stored in the woodshed when the house where I grew up was renovated 1967.
Take a look at Ingelas' blog of today 9.28
http://alegniinoffice.blogspot.com/2010/09/vad-hander-i-potatislandet.html

Hans

We got married 20 years ago today!

2010-09-01T13:35:00.000+03:00

As you see, we are still very happy!
:)

Ingela is forty-something today!

2010-08-31T12:01:00.000+03:00

Hip Hip Hooray!

Back in the salt mines...

2010-08-06T12:20:00.003+03:00

...since last Monday. A few days at work and you feel like you need another vacation immediately!

I will round off my vacation pics here with me on top of my shed, finishing the new roof:

In Björköby there is a local museum located in an old house where you can have a look at old traditional furniture, tools and clothes etc. and in the old barn there is a motor, vehicles and machines museum showing all kinds of old boat engines, motorcycles, mopeds etc. and suddenly there, in the midst of the old boat engines, there is a manual petrol (gas) pump that once was used at the local shop. That pump, once used for two-stroke petrol, gave me some nice flashbacks of my teenage years:

There were two of those pumps - one for 4% mixture and one for 5%. The shop closed at 1 PM on Saturdays and one of the ladies behind the counter was a grumpy "old girl" and did not like young moped and motor cycle riders much... She had a habit of rolling in those pumps back into the storage at about 15 minutes to 1 PM and lock the doors. Of course we then showed up at 10 minutes to 1 to fill up our mopeds and motorbikes for the weekend... :D

And of course some mandatory pictures of sunsets and the rising moon:

Have a nice weekend everybody, we are going to our summer house because the weather forecast is OK and there will be faint winds so I can do a little fishing.

Our baby boy is 18 today!

2010-07-16T10:20:00.000+03:00

Our very own entertainer and in-house loon Ian is 18 today! Congratulations and I hope you will continue to share your positive energy forever!

Dad

A piece of my radio history

2010-07-07T21:05:00.001+03:00

This "undressed" Luxor make, model "Harmony" emerged from deep inside a junkbox today when we emptied the last part of my old home. The last part to be cleaned and emptied was my old HAM-shack, a small room in the southwest corner of the new wing that was built in 1967.

That radio was the first radio in the house and bought in 1953. AM only, no FM.

This is not the radio that introduced R&B and R&R in my life but it made it even more possible to sort out signals out of noise after a lot of tweaking and modifying. My first own radio was a Philips receiver from the late thirties, but I was too young to start some excessive tweaking on that radio. This one, on the other hand, was put to severe surgery and tweaking during the autumn 1965 and onward. It even served as my first real HAM-radio receiver after I got my beginners license in 1969 because the shortwave band also included the "shipping band" and the 80 m. amateur band.

Digging deeper into the junk box I found the dial that used to sit on top of the frame. If you take an extra look you will find some blue markings on the MW-part, they were there in order to enable fast look-up of the loudest offshore stations (aka Pirate-Radio stations) on the MW-band: from left: Radio 390, Radio London aka BigL, Radio Caroline North and Radio Veronica.

It looked at me and said "Plug in the earphones!" before I threw it down into the container for metal and electronic scrap at the city dump at 2:30 PM today....

Farewell old home...

2010-07-02T12:11:00.001+03:00

I sold the place where I was born yesterday.

In the picture above, taken in the beginning of July 1961, you can see me standing in front of the house looking at the airplane cruising back and forth over the village that day.

Hand-colored aerial b&w photos of your house and surroundings was a kind of status thing back then.

This picture has been hanging on the wall in the kitchen since then.

This is how I want to remember it. At summertime I moved into the attic into a small room that is hidden behind the porch in this picture. In the mid sixties I had strung a longwire antenna from my window in the attic to the end of the barn in order to get the best possible reception of Radio London aka "Big L", Radio Caroline and all the other offshore stations. Later on I connected a homebrew AM-transmitter to that antenna and started my own Pirate Radio. :)

The house was build by my paternal grandparents in 1912 and in the picture it is more or less in the same shape as it was back then. The tin roof was installed after WW2.

The house was later renovated and expanded, the porch was torn down and replaced with an extension of the same height and width as the rest of the house, containing a bathroom, sauna and a big hall. The house was then painted yellow.

After my mom died last year it has been empty and waiting for a new owner to take care of it and restore it to todays' standards. We have moved out and sold the most of the furniture, some pieces to remember the place by has been moved to our house and to our summer house. There is still a lot of junk to be moved to the dump and the new owner is moving in this very moment.

Yesterday I handed over the keys to the new owner and also a piece of my heart...

Bye, bye house and may your days be forever happy!

Hans

Five days in London, day 2

2010-06-16T19:09:00.002+03:00

Hi there, It's been a while since I installed some stuff from our trip to London in April here, I have been occupied with a lot of other stuff and things to do in the meantime.

Most of the photos are shot with a tiny little Olympus FE-240, 7 MPix camera at "Everything Automatic."
Some of the pics I took with this camera are relly good after some tweaking in Photoscape

Anyway, day two started with a trip to St John's Wood where we walked down to Abbey Road to do the walk of the Beatles on their Abbey Road cover.
We were not alone there doing the same thing...

When we where finnished walking across Abbey Roead we took off to Buckingham Palace:

Exhausted by the Pomps And Circumstances we decided to take off to Notting Hill:

We rounded off the day by meeting Ingelas sister Anne and her husband Matt at Piccadilly Cicus and then going for a little scenic tour by bus.

To be continued...

Nikonists (or maybe Nikonians...?) ahoy!

2010-06-10T11:48:00.005+03:00

I bumped into a cheap Nikon lens, the now discontinued 28-80 mm AF 3.3 - 5.6 G, on the eBay the other day and as I'm in need of a simple allround zoom for my D70 I threw in a bid.

I became the owner of the lens above for EUR 41,50 and when it arrived it was unused in the original box!

I mounted it on my D70 yesterday evening and though it was a little rainy I went out in the backyard and fired some shots:

The pictures are shot in mediocre light late in the evening at ISO 640, White Balance at auto, aperture preference, aperture set at f6.3, tweaked only in camera, using my preferred settings regarding sharpness, color and contrast, no noise reduction applied.
The colors I got with this combination of lens and camera are as close to what i got 30 years ago shooting Fujichrome 100 slide film with my Nikkormat Ft2 and Nikkor 50mm 2.0

I must say I'm a little amazed what a second hand 6 Mpix D70 combined with a EUR 41,5 (USD 50 ) lens can do. Sorry D40, D60 and D3000 users, this lens does not work in AF mode, only manual focus on those cameras, but everybody else, go and get it if you find one!

Well it is as plastic as plastic can be and weighs nothing but it is sharp, good colors and fast AF.
I call it a bargain, the best I ever had... :)

Hans

The High School Graduate

2010-06-07T12:15:00.000+03:00

Our son, Lukas, graduated from High School last Saturday. Congratulations Luke and may the force be with you!
Photo shot by Ingela.

...and it went as suddenly as it arrived!

2010-05-25T12:28:00.001+03:00

The temperature at the Vaasa Airport at 12:15 today: 7 C! =:0

Well... I've seen worse, we had sleet and snow in the beginning of June in 1974 and the rest of that summer was cold and rainy here. I hope it won't follow that progress this summer because May 1974 was mostly very warm.

Anyway, yesterday I nailed the last piece of moulding in place in our renovated kitchen and moved out all tools and hardware back into the garage again. You who haven't been following the resurrection of our kitchen at Ingelas' blog may take a look below.

The summer arrived suddenly

2010-05-14T13:11:00.001+03:00

Above is a screenshot from the Finnish weather service today at 12:40 showing the temperature curve for the last 24 hours at the airport nearby.
+25.1 C or 77.2 F !
We even had a thunderstorm this morning which is very unusual in May.
The bad news is that this pre-summer will last only for a week. Then we are back to the normal crappy 12 - 15 C again.

In the meantime in Korsholm-Mustasaari...

2010-05-06T13:00:00.001+03:00

It is getting hectic here and I feel a little stressed now, a lot of work and our new kitchen will arrive this weekend so the old furniture has to be completely dismounted and moved out of the way before Sunday! Phew...!

Our dear old blogger friend Val at http://vereeniging.blogspot.com/ came to visit Finland last weekend and we enjoyed a couple of days in her company and that was an excellent break in our self occupied and stressed out life this very moment.

The spring is arriving very slowly, it is bitter cold at nights but we get a lot of sunshine in between and some early flowers are popping up.

In the meantime I'll will try to follow the instructions printed on that bottle above, I think it would work even better if I filled it up with brandy or something...

Though we had some trouble getting out of London when we went there, we have made up our mind to go back and cross the street above (among other tings to do) as soon as possible! In between we will perhaps go to see some barges in Rotterdam... ;)

Five Days in London, day one

2010-05-01T15:31:00.001+03:00

Our trip to London became somewhat drowned in the volcanic ash from Eyafjellajökul but before the trouble started we managed to have a lot of fun in london. The first day we went to see the RAF museum at Hendon

Spitfire at the entrance

B17G

Me Bf109G

Nose art o a Handley Page Victor, please observe the text "Axe stored here". That is not really what you expect to see on a jet bomber used to carry nuclear bombs :)

We had a lunch break and a bottle of Spitfire ale. "The bottle of Britain" :)

Lancaster

The infamous quote of Herman Göring slightly modified and translated to English and painted on the Lancaster above.

The original quote goes like this: "Ich will nicht Hermann Göring, sondern Hermann Meyer heißen, wenn jemals ein feindliches Flugzeug die deutschen Reichsgrenzen überfliegen würde."

Typhoon

The very complicated powersource of the abovementioned Typhoon, the Napier Sabre 24 cyl. H-configuration

Sunderland, oh my, this was BIG!

German V2 rocket

These are only a few of my photos from the RAF museum in Hendon. We spent the whole day from 11 am to 5 pm and we did not go and look at every subject there.

http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/london/

Of course I had to buy a souvernir and what could be better than some good old wartime Big-Band music:

What's so special about the Squadronaires? :)

The long and winding road...

2010-04-22T15:11:00.001+03:00

...back home from London:

We could of course have gone straight from W to Y but we had to go via X because our cars were parked there at the Tampere International airport.

We travelled 3000 km (1873 miles)back home in 82 hours.

The vehicles used were, starting in London: taxi, ferry, bus, train, taxi, train, ferry, bus, ferry, train, taxi, own car. One night spent in a hotel in Lille, about 7 hrs. Effective travel speed including waiting for trains etc was then 40 km/h or 25 mph. :)

OH6MY´s European tour...

2010-04-21T18:59:00.001+03:00

...is finnished!
It went like this:

-Day 1:
London UK
Newhaven UK
Dieppe France
Serqueux France
Lille France

-Day 2:
Lille France
Tournai Belgium
Bruxelles Belgium
Liege Belgium
Cologne Germany
Hamburg Germany
Rostock Germany

-Day 3:
Trelleborg Sweden
Malmoe Sweden
Stockholm Sweden

Day 4:
Turku Finland
Tampere Finland
Pirkkala Finland
Korsholm Finland

We have used the following means of transport:
-Taxi
-Bus
-Train
-Ferry

And we may have been running and walking from terminals to train stations and car rentals about 100 km.
We arrived home at about 15:00 local time today

5:15...

2010-04-17T22:47:00.001+03:00

...to Brighton, not really but tomorrow 5:15 AM out of London in a van to Newhaven in an attempt to reach the continental Europe by ferry to Dieppe. The ultimate Dieppe raid.
Then we will try to get a train to Paris and then to Stockholm. Ferry to Turku (Åbo) in Finland, train to Tampere, taxi to Tampere international airport and car back home.
Phew.
This will last some few days or more. We will blame Iceland.

Anyway, we had to spend an extra day in London, most of it spent in trying to get us out of here without any significant success. In the afternoon we took off to Richmond to see if we could spot some famous people there :)

"Mind The Gap!"...

2010-04-15T09:09:00.000+03:00

...is sounding in my ears ever so often this week so where am I ?

Spring has sprung...

2010-03-27T18:50:00.001+02:00

...or not.

Ingela picked some branches of a cherry tree in our backyard some weeks ago and brought them inside.

Now the buds have bursted into flowers.

The snow in our backyard is still at least 1/2 m.deep though so it is still very wintery.

It is raining today for the first time this spring so there is still hope... :)

Tax return time... blaaaah...

2010-03-14T09:21:00.003+02:00

My favourite pastime, not! But it has to be done every spring and of course I'm procrastinating until the very last day. But not this year, Ingela has kicked my butt several weekends now so I finally caved in...

Anyway the result was pleasing, we are going to receive some refunds later this year! Will be very much needed because we are going on a trip to London, doing a total makeover of our kitchen and a total makeover of the ceilings in our hall, living room and kitchen. I started the ceiling project yesterday.

Signs of spring to be seen here lately, we had a thaw for two days in a row and the blanket of snow shrunk some 10 cm. Now it is chilly during the nights but nice sunshine in the daytime rising the temperature close to 0 C.

Winter update

2010-03-04T19:55:00.002+02:00

Hello everybody from this frozen over hell called Finland. Blogger Val asked me regarding my last put if it has got any better now, the answer is no.

Its is worse...

Since Sunday we have got som 10 inches of snow combined with a hard northern wind yesterday and today that made the snow pile up, up to my eyebrows in places as you can see from the picture of our backyard this evening:

My car trailer parked alongside our woodshed is somewere inside the pile of snow below:

The temperature today is only a moderate -6 C but tomorrow it will drop down to -15 C again.
Aaargghhh!

Still hibernating...

2010-02-18T08:30:00.002+02:00

Nothing much else to do. The temperature plunges down below -20 C every night and hardly rises above -12 C in the middle of the day. I generally like a good old winter but this is too extreme even for my taste. The snow is soon waist deep.
To comfort myself in the meantime I upgraded from D70 to a second hand D300.
Took some test pictures from the front- and back porch last Sunday (cold) morning. You really don't want to walk around with the camera in this weather. Your fingers will be frozen stiff, the lense will stick and the battery will die in some few minutes... :(

What are these brand new suitcases doing...

2010-02-06T16:06:00.003+02:00

...in our living room?
Well, we are going to London, UK, later this spring. We had some vague plans to go around my birthday in October last year but London late in October is not such great fun.
Any ideas of places to go and stuff to see? Maybe drop by at Rachels and Petes place...? :)
One thing is sure though, RAF Museum, Hendon, here I come!

20 Years ago this day...

2010-01-28T11:34:00.000+02:00

...we decided to start dating seriously :)

We had met at common friends place earlier in the autumn, we were all working for the same employer but at different factories, our friends knew that we were both singles and came up with the idea to bring us together.

Which was a very good idea indeed! :)

From this day on 1990 we have been a couple, we got engaged to be married in June and got married in September 1990.

Ingela and her cousin Thomas AD 1990:

Me AD 1990:

The art of arctic biking

2010-01-09T10:07:00.000+02:00

As you all well know I'm biking to work all the year despite the weather conditions. It is all about the way you dress. Proper clothes, boots and gloves to suit the weather. The same goes for the bike, I change tyres to studded ones when the winter arrives and use synthetic oils for greasing. I have a totally encapsulated 7-speed Shimano hub at the rear. No complicated levers and pivots that may freeze and get stuck.
A protective bikers helmet is mandatory in Finland. As is a flashlight at the front. You have to dress yourself in reflective vest and other reflective stuff because 95% of the drivers in Finland are blind and/or doesn't pay any respect to STOP-signs.
This is what i looked like yesterday ( -27 C in the morning) when I arrived home:

winter tyre:

Nuff said...
Last Wednesday (Epiphany) as it is a holiday here in Finland we went to my mothers house out in the archipelago to help some people to carry away some furniture we sold them. I will write more about that in another blog.
It was a crisp and clear day and before we left for home I took my D70 out for a spin:

The harbour in Björkö is hibernating

Then I shot some pictures throgh the car window as we drove home:

Welcome to our arctic world or what happened to Global Warming?

2010-01-05T20:27:00.000+02:00

It is not great fun to run around outdoors with the camera nowadays when the temperature rarely rises above -15 C. Fingers get stiff and cold after some few minutes, though my Nikon D70 is quite big you cannot really handle all the small buttons and controls with mittens on. Anyway our surroundings are really beautifully shaped by the snow and ice so there is a certain need to go out and shoot some photos to show you all.

The corner of our neigbours garage drowned in the snow

Mother natures abstract art

Snowy trees on the opposite side of our street

Arctic sunset at 3 PM last Saturday

Our front door late in the evening

Red Christmas...?

2009-12-30T12:02:00.001+02:00

We had a Red Christmas this year as you can see from the picture above.
Well, not really, the picture is taken in the afternoon at sunset last Sunday when the sun broke through the clouds as it stopped snowing. White balance set on "clouds" and Ingela got exactly the colour shade of our surroundings at that very moment.

I'm not dreaming of a Christmas this white...

2009-12-22T12:10:00.000+02:00

The picture is from a webcam overlooking a traffic circle here. The snow is pouring down at 11:35 am. And more is to come the next days.
Nuff said...
Hans

The shortest day of the year

2009-12-21T13:40:00.000+02:00

Sunrise at 10:12 am
Sunset at 2:42 pm
Length of the day 4h 40 min
That is not much if you need to work by daylight :)
The sun is "shining" but it is -12 C outside in the middle of the day.
In the meantime we can enjoy our Christmas tree

Winter at last!

2009-12-16T15:33:00.001+02:00

The winter finally hit us, the temperature has occasionally plunged down to -17 C since Monday morning, last night we got about 6 inches of snow and in the morning it was like this outside when I left for work at 7:30 AM:

View from our driveway down our street

Our house as seen from the street

Our miniature tree is doing well and growing... And it seems that the jar has grown too...

just kidding, this is another, bigger one, than the one shown some weeks ago!

Today 92 years ago...

2009-12-06T12:37:00.001+02:00

...Finland declared its autonomy in the wake of the Russian revolution. Lenin had his hands full with the creation of the new Soviet Union and could not let Finland disturb his plans. He thought that once the Finns have calmed down and returned to normal, he will orchestrate a Finnish revolution with the help of the Russian solders that were still in Finland and reconnect it to the USSR, but that attempt came to a tragical end in the spring of 1918.
That is why we are flying the flag this day, December 6.

Today 70 years ago...

2009-11-30T11:02:00.000+02:00

...Finland was attacked by the Soviet Union. Many cities and civil targets were bombed the very first day, just to terrorise and demoralise the home front. The outcome was of course quite the opposite.

Vaasa: (swe: Vasa)

Helsinki: (swe: Helsingfors)

About 1000 civilians died and 2000 were wounded throughout that campaign known as the "Winter War" that lasted until March 13 1940. Finland had to give up the Karelian isthmus and other parts along the eastern border and the area around Hanko (swe: Hangö) town and peninsula inclunding big parts of the surrounding archipelago. The Soviet turned that area into a marine base.

The hostilities ended with some 23000 dead Finnish soldiers and 270000 dead Soviet soldiers.

My father was located on the coastal artillery in the easternmost parts of the Gulf of Finland in the beginning and was later transferred to the coastal artillery at Taipale in the lake Ladoga where fierce fights took place.

He escaped the Winter War without wounds but his soul was scarred...

Growing our own Christmastree

2009-11-22T12:13:00.001+02:00

We are growing our own Christmastree in a jar and we hope it will grow into full size before the Christmas eve.

Just kidding... :)

There must be something wrong with the weather now, the sun has been shining from blue skies for two consecutive days now. But tonight we will have rain again...

I have to confess...

2009-11-08T11:18:00.003+02:00

...that I got carried away by Ingelas new Nikon D3000 and made up my mind to get my own DSLR and refresh some of my old knowledge of the art of photography and upgrade it to include digital photography.
I started to google around and search eBay for something cheap and nice to suit my wallet. The brand was of course already set because of the Nikon D3000 and my first impression was that a D40 would be the thing to get because of the 6 Mpix sensor with big pixels, but much to my surprise I found that D40:s are still quite expensive (seems to be kind of "cult" camera nowadays...) though it is not in Nikons program of products anymore. That added to the fact that the autofocusing and measuring system in D40 is rather simple my attention was turned towards the D50 and D70 series of cameras, sporting the same 6 Mpix sensor but a better and more versatile metering system and as a big advantage, the possibility to use the older fullformat Nikon AF-lenses without motor. You can only use AF-S lenses with own built-in motors with the D40, D60, D3000 and D5000.
Taking into the comparition that the D50 is just a "crippled" and cheaper version of D70 that was concocted to fill in at the consumer starter level some years ago before the D40, my opinion was clear, a D70 or D70s it has to be! As my son, Markus, owns a D70s since some years ago, and have praised the functionality of that camera, I stared to search the web.
I soon found a good looking D70 body (with the D70s software), fired just in excess of 9000 times, just in the middle of my expected price range so I threw a bid on that and much to my surprise I won the auction.
The camera arrived last Monday and it really was in nearly mint condition. No signs of use other than the info in the EXIF-file that the shutter had been fired less than 10000 times.
It works like a charm though it is of course bigger and heavier than the D3000 but it fits like a glove in my hands.
The only drawback is a rather small screen but you get used to it...:) That is a small price to pay when it was about half the price of the D3000!
And yes, Ingela had to be compensated with another toy that is most permanently sitting on the D3000 now, the new 35 mm f:1.8 AF-S DX from Nikon.:) If you buy this lens you will most probably use it all the time.
You can then really forget about using your flash indoors.

Last Friday night we spent the evening in the sofa with some Glühwein, lit some candles and I took some pictures with my new toy:

Yeah, it is a little noisy but it is shot in candlelight at ISO 1600 without tripod :)

Looks warm and cosy, doesn´t it? But the morning after we woke up in a landscape like this:

Seems that the winter hit us once again but today, Sunday, it is nearly gone again.

The BIG 6-0 continued

2009-10-29T19:12:00.002+02:00

My son Markus and his girlfriend Tuuli came up from Helsinki the weekend before my birthday to celebrate my big 6-0. On Saturday evening we went to a nice restaurant to have a good meal. Ingela's mom joined us.

Afterwards we went home to our place for coffee and three different kinds of desserts.

And then followed the unavoidable SingStar competition:

The old lead singer :)

Ian

Lukas and Markus

Lukas and Ian

Ingela, the very excited listener, sewing together her granny square afghan.

The party continued the following Friday, but that is a different story :)

Wow!

2009-10-25T12:58:00.001+02:00

Even the sun remembered my birthday and produced a new set of sunspots on October 23 :)

Solarcycle no 24 has been a slow starter so far but this set of spots are good looking. But I'm still predicting a cold winter here on the northern hemisphere.

The BIG 6-0

2009-10-23T16:46:00.002+03:00

Still looking good... Eh?

Still feeling like 29 though I might well be looking like the autumn leaves below :)

Or like my son Markus' impression of me looking into the mirror seeing the little kid I still am:

Some cold resistant species

2009-10-14T18:46:00.001+03:00

Despite the low temperatures the last days there are some species out in our garden that do not really care. I found some rucola flowers and the gooseberries are still hanging in there.

-7 C and descending...

2009-10-11T12:28:00.001+03:00

Last night the temperature dropped down to -7 C and the forecast tells us that it will continue to drop day by day now. Which tells me that whenever there will be a low pressure arriving from the Atlantic ocean we will have snow, lots of snow...
Anyway, the weather was crisp and clear this morning and the nature was beautifully glaced by the frost so I decided to take the new Tamron 90mm macro for a spin.
I am in the beginning of the learning curve how to use this new toy of ours and it shows of course.

A new Toy in the family

2009-10-08T20:38:00.001+03:00

Let me introduce you to Nikon D3000 and friends:

After a long time of procrastination, thinking and rethinking, searching for the best fit for our money and needs we finally invested in a new camera, a DSLR with a few lenses. The camera body is the new Nikon D3000 introduced in August this year, the lens included in the package is the 18-55mm standard zoom with Vibration Reduction. As extras I chose the classic Tamron 90 mm short tele with 1:1 macro, now available with built-in autofocus motor to suit simpler camera bodies like this. From another resource I found a cheap Nikon telezoom, the 55-200 but without vibration reduction.

Well now nobody here in this house can blame the equipment if taking crappy pictures with this stuff...:)

Well, if you take a look at the specs for this camera you will see that the sensor is just a moderate 10 MPixels and the "old" camera, the Olympus SP570 UZ is the same so what´s the big deal?

The big deal is that the physical size of the sensor in this camera is twice the size, width- and heightwise which makes the light receiving area four times bigger as well as the size of every pixel itself which provides for better sensitivity with less picture noise in low light. And the resolution of the lens itself can be better utilised on a larger sensor.

I may not have mentioned it before but (as so many other people involved in vacuum tubes, radio and audio) I was deeply involved in photography in the good old days. Back in the beginning of the sixties I would run around with an old box camera my mom got from her sister Hilda who was living in the USA and later on I got my own box camera.

My first girlfriend's dad owned a Yashica two-lens reflex camera for 70 mm film and that was the first camera I ever used that could take really good pictures. I learned how to develop film and got myself an enlarger, a second-hand Opemus III and started to make copies in B&W. The first 35 mm camera I bought was a Nikkormat FT2 in 1975 with a hefty 35-105 mm Sigma zoom lens that was something new and exclusive then. Later I bought a real pocket camera a Rollei 35S for 35 mm film and that was a nice little camera that travelled with me everywhere. Started to shoot color slides and traded in my old Opemus for a new Durst with a color head and started to make color copies of my slides.

Nowadays all that equipment is sold and all cameras in this household are digital cameras, compact- and bridgecameras and now this new Nikon.

Some samples taken with this camera and the Tamron lens:

The Party Goes On...

2009-09-01T11:47:00.003+03:00

...today! It is 19 years today since Ingela and I got married in this beautiful church:

Never a dull moment since... :)

Happy Birthday!

2009-08-31T11:54:00.003+03:00

Congratulations to Ingela, my beloved wife!

Time to move forward

2009-08-01T13:07:00.005+03:00

As you can imagine there has been a lot of thinking to do and I must tell you that it creates a lot of stress inside my head.
As I was my mom's only child I have to make plans for the future regarding my mom's stuff and what to do with the house etc. etc.
We have emptied the refrigerator and freezers and got rid of the flowers, taken care of valuable stuff and documents of importance and shut down everything except the circulation pump for the heating system.
There is oil in the tank to keep the house warm at a reduced temperature next winter but in the meantime i want to find somebody to buy the house because it is in much need of renovation and I simple cannot afford to do that.
We already have a house of our own and the small summer place so we already have two money-sinks on our hands.

Rest In Peace, Dina

2009-07-13T11:29:00.006+03:00

The funeral took place Friday July 3. In the picture I'm surrounded by my sons - from left to right - Markus, Lukas and Ian.
Picture by Ingela.

She is gone

2009-06-21T14:28:00.009+03:00

My mother died today, Sunday, June 21, at the age of 88 years, 6 months and 14 days.
Rest in peace, Dina!

Dina 2 1/2 years old in 1923

Dina 19 years old, in the spring of 1940

Dina 27 years old early in 1948 a few months before she married my father.

Dina surrounded by her grandchildren Lukas, Ian and Markus in 2005

This is the last picture of her at acceptable health in January 2009

Changes

2009-06-16T20:18:00.003+03:00

My mom, Dina, is seriously ill and hospitalised since the end of April this year. The photo above is 1 1/2 year old and taken the day she turned 87.
She has struggled with cancer since 1993, it started with cancer in the bladder and she went through a bladder removal with a urostomy in 1996, after that they have removed melanomas from her forehead and she got her right breast removed in 2006.
The last six months her health has deteriorated and the results from several tests show that a lot of indicators for cancer are severely elevated but she denied any kind of agressive treatment, no operations, no drugs, no nothing at this stage. She just want to leave this life in peace and takes only pain killing shots. She is fading away day by day.
Her house out in the archipelago is empty and cold now and it gives me an odd feeling to think about that she won't go back there anymore.

Bruce Springsteen rocked Tampere

2009-06-03T11:07:00.010+03:00

Yes he did!
We left from here around noon yesterday for 2h45min drive to the city of Tampere and got to the venue about 1 1/2 h before the gates opened and the security check started.
There were approx 1500 people in the line in front of us so we did not really expect to get some really good spots this year but at last we found ourselves togeteher with Steve, a guy from Ireland we bumped into when fighting for a good spot.

Steve and me waiting in great anticipation...

When the show was about to start we took advantage of the sudden chaos of people sitting and then standing up to advance some few steps and ended up just some few feet from the fence to the right of the center of the stage more or less in front of Soozie.

In this picture you may see how close we got. Why do I get this "Sally Simpson" feeling here...?

Well the show was like an eruption of energy and we left Tampere with our ears ringing and legs hurting of 7 hours af walking, standing and jumping around. regarding the tinnitus it wasn't so much because of the sound level of the music, in front of the stage the PA:s are blasting away over your head but my ears was ringing because I was caught in the middle of a group of ladies in their mid forties and some teenage girls who were screaming their lungs out... :)
Sorry Ingela, no offence!

Badlands
Radio Nowhere
Prove It All Night
Outlaw Pete
Out in the Street
Hungry Heart
Working on a Dream
Seeds
Johnny 99
The Ghost of Tom Joad
Raise Your Hand
Cover Me
Because the Night
Thunder Road
Waiting on a Sunny Day
The Promised Land
Dark End of the Street
Kingdom of Days
Lonesome Day
The Rising
Born to Run

Encore:
Hard Times Come Again No More
Bobby Jean
Land of Hope and Dreams
American Land
Glory Days
Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
Dancing in the Dark

I hope we will see him perform this tonight:

2009-06-02T08:37:00.002+03:00

If he does I will go nuts.... :)
Anyway, we are leaving at noon for Tampere to watch mr Springsteen and his E-Street Band tonight.
He seems to perform some really good sixties covers on a regular basis on this tour.
And "Outlaw Pete" of course :)
A report will follow whenever I recover...

An "English Boy" is turning 64 today

2009-05-19T07:59:00.002+03:00

Congratulations Pete and don't you ever dare to think of retirement!
:)

Quadrophenia takes to the stage in Plymouth

2009-05-07T12:55:00.003+03:00

Pete Townshends major opus "Quadrophenia" takes to the stage in Plymouth UK on Saturday.
Wish I were there!
I did not own a scooter in the sixties, I owned a bloody old Russian Izhevsk-49 motorbike, that was the only stuff on two wheels I could afford...

My bike looked like this that I found at: http://www.overlocker.narod.ru/ij-49/izh-49.htm

It is the time of the year...

2009-04-05T11:22:00.007+03:00

...when I remember what happened around Easter holidays 1964. There emerged a new radio station named Radio Caroline on the Medium Wave band and that station was playing my kind of music. More stations followed and in 1966 there were a lot of them on international waters around the coasts of the UK and most of them in the Thames estuary and south of the coast of Essex moored on the "Pirate Alley" From Clacton-on-sea to Frinton-on-sea.
It is now the 45:th anniversary of Radio Caroline and i will show you a QSL-card from that fabolous year of 1966 when offshore-radio was at its summit.

The BBC is also celebrating this, running special programs from the former lightship LV10 using the name "Pirate BBC Essex" from 10:th to 13:th of April.
Links:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/essex/content/articles/2007/08/01/pirate_bbc_essex_listen_live_feature.shtml
http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/kneesflashes/happenings/aprilmayjune09/TonyandArnold.pdf

A great lineup of former offshore DJ:s including Tony Blackburn and Keith Skues will attend.
Not to forget "The Boat that Rocked", the fiction movie about the abovementioned subject that is now out in the UK and will be out in the rest of Europe 16 - 17-APR-09
http://www./theboatthatrocked.com/
Watch the trailers and listen to the music! The soundtrack will be hot!

Finally, some sunspots

2009-04-01T12:21:00.002+03:00

Solarcycle 24 has so far produced very few sunspots and now there is a debate wheter cycle 24 has really started or not. This sunspot minimum is so deep and prolonged as such a lack of solar activity has not been seen in soon 200 years.
Some scientists are already predicting a new "small ice-age" like the one in the middle of the 17:th century as a result.

But today there finally emerged some sunspots on the surface of the sun...

Lethargic, procrastinating and cold

2009-02-16T13:55:00.008+02:00

Hi there,
It has been a while.
I thought I had to give you all a life sign :)
Yes, I'm alive but I am all the abovementioned in the header. It is just the time of year, after a long dark winter, when I allow myself to slow down and do nothing. I start to feel some kind of fear for all kinds of duties and work that is ahead of me now that the days grow longer (and probably warmer...) and I retard into this kind of "numb" and lethargic mode until somebody (probably Ingela...) kicks my ass and tells me to get my acts together.
Well I promise, I will wake up soon and finalize a lot of interrupted projects and if the weather allows, we will take off to the woods next week and continue the work were we left off last spring.

Our son Lukas turned 18 in the meantime and got his driver's license soon after his birthday, so now we are relieved from a lot of transportation duties.

The weather is nice at the moment, but a little too cold in the mornings, but it makes the nature look wonderful and white.
The photo is from last Saturday (and nicked from Ingelas' blog) when we went to the village out in the archipelago where I grew up.
Those wo commented my question over at Rachel's site and gave us input regarding the opening lines of Pete's "Baba O'Riley" can see the result here:

Thank you for your kind input!

Belated New Year wishes!

2009-01-06T10:23:00.006+02:00

Well, we are now nearly a week into the new year but better late than never... :)
Christmas and New Year came and went and left behind some 5 lbs extra around my waist and a lot of Christmas gifts to everyone in the family. One of the most popular was Singstar for PlayStation 2 with ABBA and 80's hits included. OMG, I was about to pee in my pants when the boys started duelling late on Cristmas eve. You know, here in the Nordic countries, Santa comes in person to give the gifts away on Christmas eve and then the fun starts.
We spent New Year's Eve with our good friends and brought the PS2 and Singstar eguipment along and continued singing until 2 am. Great fun! The lady in that family sings in a choir and her husband is a teacher but also a really skilled multi-instrumentalist, drums, bass guitar, rhythm and solo guitar and as it turned out, also a very good singer! So the competition was tough!
Another nice gift was "Mamma Mia - The Movie" on DVD. When putting the DVD in and starting to watch the trailers I was quite surprised to see this:

As I was quite an "Anorak" in my teens, I really have to go and watch this movie if it comes to Finland. The story is about some Pirate Radio stations competing with each other on international water, broadcasting to the UK offshore from the coast of Essex but also facing a common enemy: the British governement, especially the Postmaster General and the BBC.
The story is fictional but loosely based on the commercial offshore stations that were operating from international waters and broadcasting rock and pop music in the mid sixties but got prohibited by the Marine &c Broadcasting Offences Act of 1967
Followers of Pete Townshend's blog back in 2006 may have noticed that Pete gave a great credit to those stations and how they influenced the music scene of the UK and Europe at that time when most public radio stations like the BBC only broadcasted some 1/2 hour of pop and rock music once a week.

The station with the strongest and best signal here in Finland was Radio London and could be received all day long during the winters of 1965 to 1967 and that station was my source of new exciting music and the one where I first heard "Can't Explain" in early 1965.
The Radio London fan site, operated by Mary and Chris Payne contains all the Fab40 charts of Radio London aka BigL from the very start to the bitter end: http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/fabforty/index.html Radio London (as also the pioneer station Radio Caroline) was a breeding ground for many famous (in Europe and the UK...) DJ's and TV-personalities like Kenny Everett, Keith Skues, Tony Blackburn and John Peel to name a few.
A tip: put in "Hans" into the search engine of the Radio London site and hit "search"... ;)
Well... Hans Knots' site is a real goldmine for everyone interested in offshore Pirate Radio, follow the link to Offshore radio Stations on the right of his homepage.

Edit Jan 19:
I went searching for "Radio London" on YouTube the other day and I found a very nice video:

Here we see a lot of familliar "voices" in action. They who own the album "The Who Sell Out" will recognise the jingles. :)
Remember to stop Garys' radio station by hiting the square button while you watch these videos.
By the way, "The Boat That Rocked" will be out in Europe in the mid of April this year.

Season's Greetings

2008-12-23T09:29:00.007+02:00

Merry Christmas to everyone in Bloggerland!
A picture of our Christmas tree version 2008 is here:

I think all of you can recognise this guy and especially this version:

But did you know that the "grandfather" of this Santa was a Finn? And his "grandmother" was a Swede?
The Coca-Cola Santa is the creation of mr. Haddon Sundblom, born 1899 in Muskegon, Michigan. His father came from Foglo in the Aland archipelago (Finland was a part of Russia back then) and his mother was from Sweden.
The rights to this picture belongs to the Coca-Cola company for sure but I nicked this picture from here:
St.Nicholas Center

Last weekend the Christmas-bunny paid us a visit:

He came bouncing into our backyard at dawn and took cover underneath our raspberry bushes. He has not fully developed his white wintercoat yet so he has to take cover from the dogs and other predators in the neighbourhood during daylight.
He sat there the whole day until dusk, then he bounced away looking for something to eat.
As you see, we have got a white Christmas this year though nearly all of the snow in this picture melted away in the middle of last week but then the weather changed for the colder and we have got some few inches more of snow by now and the temperature is several degrees C below zero now and this day dawned crisp and clear.
Ingela is baking and making n+1 different kinds of pickeled herring in the kitchen and I am just loafing around...
Well I suppose it's time to fetch the vacuum-cleaner and throw out the carpets.
See ya next year!

Lots of congratulations

2008-12-12T09:05:00.004+02:00

Uh-oh... Time flies and I have not been around Blogspot for a while.
In the meantime my mother has turned 88, the very same day Pete and Roger received the Kennedy Center Honors of 2008, Ingela's father turned 81 and last but not least: Matti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland and renown peace-negotiator, recieved the Nobel Peace Prize of 2008
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQomxbnQr7E
Embedding of this clip was disabled
Yesterday there was a big celebration concert in honor of mr. Ahtisaari in Norway, the concert was broadcasted on TV here in the Nordic countries.
My congratulations to all mentioned above.

And congratulations to myself, my amplifier is now working at full power, a new output transformer was shipped from Germany some weeks ago, all demons (like unwanted internal feedback and oscillation...) have been exorcised and it sounds really good, the output power before onset of excessive distortion in the power-amp itself is even higher than expected, I aimed for 50W but it is nearly 60W at less than 10% distortion which would be acceptable for any amplifier used for public announcement.
Single tone, pure sine wave at 1 kHz produces 50W at 2% distortion in clean mode.
It is funny that the guitar-amp industry never went for these tubes (QQE06/40 aka 5894)as they were around and mass produced in the late fifties.
Maybe the solution with the anode-contacts located on the top of the tube was a little scary and made tube-change a little more complicated. At least Ampeg built a big 200W amplifier using 6146B:s and they also have a similar solution with anode contacts on the top so the solution was not completely unfamiliar.
Now I have to build the second channel and order another output transformer from Germany. Then I will build it a nice case and hopefully get it ready in time for the fund-raising ball that Lukas and his classmates will arrange this winter in benefit for their trip to Germany and Poland this spring.

Flamenco-Pete :)

2008-11-18T11:52:00.003+02:00

Won't Get Fooled Again, Flamenco style :)
Recorded at The Troubadur, LA, November 7 2008
You have to stop Gary Stocktons' Radio Station while you play this video! Hit the square-shaped button in the upper left corner of the player.

And yes Pete, we feel very good about it!

Guitar amplifier prototyping

2008-11-12T18:54:00.006+02:00

Remember I was showing some bits and pieces of an amplifier project-to-be last spring?
Well now that the nights grow longer and the weather is constantly crappy I have been taking some few hours every now and then to work on my project.
I started to work on the schematics in the spring and decided to squeeze in two channels on the same chassis (which really wasn't a good idea because it got so cramped underneath the hood...) taking advantage of the very compact output tube which is a double-beam-tetrode (=two tubes inside the same glass-envelope) known as QQE 06/40 in Europe or 5894 in the USA, the 829A can also be used as a substitute if biased correctly.
Well, one channel is now ready but I think you wonder why there are two output power-tubes connected when channel number 2 is otherwise unpopulated.
The reason is that because of a calculation mistake I made, the impedance matching ratio of the output transformer was set way too low. And it didn't help that the guy who wound the transformer made it even lower by mistake.
With one tube attached I could not get much power transferred to the speaker before the tube-plates started to glow red.
So I put two output-tubes in parallel to get a better match and really carry out some serious tests.
This first channel has two pieces of 12AX7:s (hi-gain double triode) the first half of the first is a low-distortion pre-amp with some amount of local-negative feedback followed by a gain control potentiometer dumping the signal into the other half which has a switchable gain which can be doubled with a flip of a switch and easily driven into asymmetrical clipping (aaahhh.... the real tube distortion...) when set in hi-gain mode. Then follows a Marshall-type tone-stack, bass treble and mid-range adjustment, which is recalculated to fit into my topology, in the Marshall version it is driven at low impedance from the cathode of a 12AX7 while I tap my signal in from the anode.
After the tone stack is another main volume control that dumps the signal into another 12AX7 where the first half is a replica of the first stage with slightly less gain and provision to tap in global negative feedback from the loudspeaker outlet to reduce distortion in the PA and to provide for better damping in the bass-region. The second half is a cathodyne (squeezbox) phase-splitter which splits the signal into two signals of equal strength and opposite phase, this signal is then amplified in a 12AU7 which has enough current dumping capacity to drive the low-impedance gate1 circuit of the QQE 06/40. This QQE 06/40 is a rugged little bastard capable of doing the work of two EL34:s or 5881:s in one small case.
I have used this tube before on 145 MHz Amateur radio band and it could take a lot of abuse.
In the photo I'm testing the amp in our laundry-room. I found a really nice oscilloscope-software which turns your computer into an oscilloscope, a frequency analyser and a signal generator. Very handy I may say!
I then tested with the guitar in the garage and wow!
Despite that I could not get but a fraction of the output the sound was good and the tube distortion function worked like a dream.
A new output transformer is ordered and the old is going back in return to be rewound for another project that involves 2 pcs of KT-100 (or 6550) but that is a story to be told later.

Last Sunday the bloody amp jumped off the desk and bit my hand...
Just kidding, I just pulled another stunt, being stupid and not taking the right precautions (like falling of the ladder last summer) when trying to turn the beast (it weighs about 25 pounds) upside down while plugged in and working.
When I grabbed the handles, I also touched the soldering lugs on the power transformer in the front. That winding is connected to the rectifier for the high-voltage for the PA-tubes and that high-voltage (about 350 V DC during that test) was shorted to the chassis by my left hand (and some also via my right hand through my body) and made me see blue, red and yellow dots and stars appear inside my eyeballs while 25 V AC passed through the path between the lugs burning my skin severely.
Luckyly I could let it go and drop some inches down on the desk but my left hand was very numb for the rest of the day.
Building amps is very painful.

Congratulations to USA

2008-11-05T08:10:00.002+02:00

...and to the rest of the free world!
Obama for president and The Who on tour in USA
I envy you!
:)
It is not every morning you rise and find that the world has changed.
Lets' hope for the change to take place, really!
We won't get fooled again!

59

2008-10-23T08:54:00.003+03:00

Today I am a 59.
Being a Radio Amateur (or HAM-radio operator) I am very pleased with that :)

Because a 59 is the best signal report a Radio Amateur can get.
It is explained here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RST_code
5 = Perfectly readable
9 = Very strong signals

We can leave out the "tone" part because I'm not so active on CW ( = Morse code telegraphy) nowadays.
I will stay a 59 for some 8760 hours :)

Finland in the headlines again.... :(

2008-09-23T14:28:00.005+03:00

At lest nine students killed in a school-shooting at a vocational school not far from here. BBC news
Kauhajoki is only some 55 miles to the southeast from here were we live which makes it more frightening to me as a teenager parent than did the school-shooting in Jokela last year.
This is not the crowded urban district of the southern Finland or USA but a peacful rural area.
Something is definitely really wrong with the way we treat our youth nowadays. It's a fact that mental healthcare, especially for younger people, has been run down the last few years now when we are scrapping the idea of being a Nordic-type welfare country where the healthcare and education is run by the society.
Outsourcing, privatisation and plain scrapping of resources for healthcare and education is slowly taking its' toll...
And the politicians and the media are already blaming the internet.
What this gunman may have posted on the web is not the fault of internet itself, it is just another cry for help...

Light a candle for the poor souls tonite.

Update at 6 PM:

The number of victims is now raised to 10 and the shooter died in hospital later today, that makes the death toll 11. Three injured.
I searched the YouTube for "Kauhajoki" immediately when I heard of this shooting a while after 11 AM today and I found two videos of a guy handling and shooting with a Walther PP 22 but I did not mention it here earlier.
Now it is confirmed by the police that this guy on the videos is the shooter. The same videos have been rolling on the TV-news since I arrived at home.

The most cruel fact is that the shooter was interrogated by the police as late as yesterday when they got reports regarding the videos on the YouTube that were uploaded last Friday!
The police did not find anything alarming in the guys behavior and the licence for the weapon was not withdrawn and the weapon was not confiscated...
The policeman responsible for this action yesterday cannot be reached today according to the police force and local news.

Anniversaries, birthdays and PETE

2008-09-01T08:32:00.006+03:00

Today, 18 years ago on a sunny and warm day Ingela and I were married! Yesterday was Ingela's birthday. Congratulations to us!

This morning at 05:20 AM we got rudely awakened by PETE....
No, not mister Townshend but the paramedics and rescue helicopter serving this area.
It was flying back and forth and circulating at approx 100 ft. above the area where we live for about 3 hours.
It literally rattled the tiles on our roof and every cup and plate in our cupboards.
Maybe some poor guy have got lost in the woods surrounding our place or maybe some criminal from the county jail is on the run...
Hope not.
By the way they manouvered back and forth I could tell that they were using their infrared (thermovision) camera to search for somebody lost/hiding.

The photo is nicked ftrom PETE:s homepage:
http://www.pelastushelikopteri-pete.fi/Default.aspx?id=488501
PETE is an acronym of some finnish words for rescue activities &c.

Update at 1:50 PM
As you can see from the comment Ingela made they were searching for a 82 year old man who had got lost last night. He was found close to his home at around nine o'clock AM today and brought to hospital.

Lazy sun?

2008-08-27T12:20:00.004+03:00

As a radio amateur I've been following the sunspots cycles nearly my whole life. And I very soon found that there is a kind of correlation with sunspot activity and the weather on earth. Sunspots are the source of massive eruptions on the surface of the sun and those electrically charged particles bombardes the earth, causes Aurora at both poles, stirs up the upper part of the ionosphere and thermosphere, distorts the magnetic field of the earth and thus influencing the dynamics in the atmosphere and oceans.
This is not in any way increasing (or decreasing) the mean temperature of the globe but it influences the distribution of warm and cold masses of air, especially in the area between the tropics and the poles where the sun never hits zenith.
There is a slight delay of one year or so because of the thermal capacity of the atmosphere, oceans and earth's crust down to some few meters but usually when the sunspot activity is high, we have warm summers and relatively mild winters but with great dynamics especially at winters, weather changing from very cold to snowstorms and mild weather within some few days and from prolonged periodes with sunny and warm weather changing into thunderstorms and rain in the summer here up in the northern Europe.
When the sunspot activity is low, we have cold and rainy summers with a constant travel of low pressure from the North Atlantic, only some few warm days and sunshine, it is more like spring transmogrifying into a prolonged autumn followed by a long and cold winter culminating in very low temperatures some two or three weeks in the end of January, beginning of February.
The last sunspot cycle ended last year and now there has been virtually no real sunspot activity for the last few months as stated in the article linked to in the header of this blog.
The sunspot activity is fluctuating in cycles of 10 to 12 years with a mean value of 11 years. On top of this we have a "minimum of minimum" cycle of 21 - 22 years and we are now in the midst of such a superminimum.
I can still remember the summer of 1965 and winter of 1966 as the worst and coldest in my youth and the summer of 1986, the winter of 1987 and summer of 1987 as very cold here. The denominator of these events was a similar lack of sunspot activity the very same or preceeding year.
So I cannot be very wrong if I predict a winter colder than normal and a shitty summer to follow....
This summer might be remembered as warm and dry compared to what is ahead of us here up north...
I hope I'm wrong and I hope that the sun will wake up into the next sunspot cycle very soon now.

The photo of the sun is by courtesy of NASA

Old news

2008-08-06T14:45:00.002+03:00

Relax

2008-07-21T19:33:00.002+03:00

As i told you earlier, we are carrying out a total makeover at our summerhouse out in the archipelago.
This is how our bedroom wall immediately above the bed turned out to be, repainted and redecorated:

Bruce Springsteen

2008-07-13T10:38:00.007+03:00

Rocked Helsinki last Friday and we were there in the very front row... Errr... second or third row to be more exact. Ingela managed to shoot some nice pictures with the small camera we purchased for the Who show one year ago.

The setlist was a massive 31 pieces including lots of wishes from the audience including "Santa Claus is Coming To Town" (in the middle of July ??) and the show lasted for over three hours! The Boss was in good form and he really is the Real Duracell-Rabbit of Rock and Roll, windmilling even more than Good Old Pete !
He keeps going and going and going where I (exactly one month younger) would have fainted hours ago.

I just wanna hear some rhythm
I want a thousand guitars
I want pounding drums
I want a million different voices

And that is exactly what we got. Not a thousand guitars but brilliant guitar duels between Nils Lofgren, The Boss and Little Steven and maybe not a million voices but at least some 42000 + the E-Street Band

Update

2008-07-06T20:40:00.023+03:00

w

Hi bloggers, its' been a while and that is because my days have been filled with all kind of work and stuff. Our old terrace had to go. The reason was that the foundation wasn't frost proof and we wanted to add a sun-roof and glazed walls later on. The old one was torn down and i started to lay a new foundation and make it frost-proof by installing insulating foam-plastic around the foundation pillars.

After some few weeks of hard work one can get a picture of what its' going to look like. Still a lot of tweaking, tuning and painting to do.

In the meantime we are doing a total interior makeover at our summerhouse. The summerhouse is built of finnish pine timber 24 years ago and was treated with clear lacquer in the beginning but the timber has turned very dark so we decided to paint it white on the inside. This is how it was before:

and after:

In between I also installed the gas-cooker my wife has longed for for years:

Seems like a lot of work doesn't it? You bet!
But we also have time for fun and relaxation. The summer solstice is usually a great event to be celebrated here in Finland. We invited our friends for a nice dinner with wine and music and my friend Keijo who is a great guitar player wanted to test my homebuilt speaker cabinet described earlier on this blog:

He was playing and playing, trying different settings, riffs, licks and chords and told me that it was the best 4x12 he had played in his whole life. I don't know what to believe but he ordered one copy there on the spot. I had good luck, the eBay shop in Germany from where I bought the speaker elements still had some few left so I can make another cabinet with the same elements and get that sound he liked so much.

Then some more work. Yesterday I took to the woods with my boys and my uncle Nils who is a now retired farmer but still driving his tractor like a 20 years old youngster. The first load of wood went ok but then shit happened:
I think the picture is very descriptive but ve had to unload what was left on the trailer, tilt the trailer back on it's wheels and reload.... phew...!
But it made a nice pile when unloading it at my mothers backyard. And half of the lot is still there in the woods and have to be picked up later whenever Nils has time to help us.

My summer holidays began last weekend and we will be leaving for Helsinki tomorrow. Bruce Springsteen will play there on Friday evening and we will be there.
Now for some more relaxed pictures of me and my wife Ingela:

Have a nice summer! I maybe won't show up here until the end of August :)
Hans

The real Killer Rabbit

2008-06-12T11:16:00.003+03:00

What's up with the animals around here nowadays?
A few weeks ago we had a bear running for the city-center and now there is a rabbit killing crows downtown!
Watch this video:
http://www.iltasanomat.fi/videot/uutiset/1542907
This is a finnish newsletter but you don't have to understand the language to watch the video.
Maybe it is uploaded on YouTube as well because the link will disappear from that page within some days.
This incident happened some days ago on the yard of a Kindergarden downtown.
Those crows must have pissed the hare off big time :)
It is an Eastern Jackrabbit, lepus europaeus, very common here.
Do we have to blame the global warming once again?
:)

The Urban Bear

2008-05-24T19:34:00.006+03:00

This picture I nicked from the website of our local newsletter at www.vasabladet.fi and you can see a bear carreering down the middle of the road heading towards downtown Vasa.
This incident happened yesterday morning when I was biking in to work. Just outside the site where my office is located I saw a lot of police cars running up and down the road, lights flashing, and I thought they were looking for some bank robbers or jailbirds on the run.
When I entered the office I was asked if I had seen any bear coming towards me because they had heard on the radio that a bear was heading down the same bikers lane I use and heading towards the city center!
It seems that te bear had already went past the junction where I enter the very same lane and some 45 mins. later we heard a report that the bear was shot and killed and the "bear-crisis" was over.
The bear had been spotted early in the morning at the outskirts of the city where it had destroyed some beehives and eaten some twenty pounds of honey and thus refreshed it seemingly headed for the market square downtown to get some more :)
When it got dangerously close to a kindergarten and a hospital the police was called in to turn it around but the stubborn guy had set his mind for the city center and that was a big no-no.
Sorry 'bout that mr. Bear!

The Music Must Change

2008-05-17T18:42:00.003+03:00

Well, we have had Classic Rock, Hard Rock, Punk Rock, Industrial Rock etc. but now it's time for Chainsaw Rock!
Lukas traded in the SG- clone for a Jonsered CS2137 and it sounded... awful!
To much distortion and smoke for my taste.

Anyway, the spring has not really sprung here yet though things looked promising at the end of April and the beginning of May but then we had a backlash. Then it looked promising again around Mothers day but that very afternoon temperature plunged from +21 centigrades to 13 centigrades in one hour and has dropped down to below 10 the rest of the week. We have had frost every night and last night it went down to -6 degrees! Global Warming, my arse...
Yesterday they had 5 inches of snow in Sweden at the same latitudes as here. I hope we won't have snow because then I would get seriously depressed.
No relief in the next ten days according to the Global Forecast System predictions for Europe.
But the UK seems to have had the best spring weather in many years. Aaargghh!

Away from home

2008-05-03T16:09:00.005+03:00

This weekend we skipped the work in the woods, we located the kids elsewhere and my wife and I went to see our old bloggerfriends down in the archipelago in the southwest, they live in a place called Nagu (fi: Nauvo) where they have dismantled an old log house, relocated it to a new site and rebuilt it carefully and with good taste. You will find more pictures at Ingelas blog

Above you see the marina in Nagu

Here above is the old church. You don't see many churches of stone up at our latitudes but here in "the wealthy south" they are common.

This is typical Finnish humour, the name of the local store is "Nagu Korv och Spik" (fi: Nauvon Nakki ja Naula) which means "Nagu Sausage and Nails" in english. The name refers to the versatility of their operations.
:)

Garage Rock or the making of the egg...

2008-04-24T19:36:00.004+03:00

The first part of my project is now assembled and the testing and tweaking has started. It is incredible what soundlevels a 4x12 cabinet connected to a small 20 W amplifier can produce in a small garage. My ears are ringing slightly :) Have to be careful not to get tinnitus. The audio range is as expected and I really got the oomph I looked for in the bass region. Running up and down the lowest string on the SG-clone makes the sleeves of the shirt vibrate and all tools and stuff in the garage rattle. There are some extra noise and resonances from the backpanel of the box so I have to mount some bracing ribs on the inside to stiffen it up. Otherwise it is good and Lukas is amazed :)
I have not used any fancy stuff for the finnish, the outside of the box I covered with left-over glassfiber wall-paper we used in our house, glued it on and painted it black, the material on the front, protecting the speakers is burlap or jute fabric used in simple bags or coffee-sacks.
The logo: HAm with the arrow on the "m" (yes of course...) I added just for fun. Why "HAm"?
There are some reasons, my real name is Hans Åström and in this anglophile world we drop the "rings" and the "umlauts" so it becomes Hans Astrom. In the company where I work we use the intitial letter of the fist name and combine it with the initial and last letter of the last name = HAm when we approve drawings and documents etc.
The other reason is that I am a Radio Amateur holding an operators licence. An amateur radio operator is known as a "HAM" and that I am.
The arrow does not need any explanations in the Wholigan community but in my version it is modified to depict one of the common symbols for an antenna when drawing electronics schematics.
Now off to build the amplifier...

Edit April 25:
If somebody does not understand what Dale is talking about in her comment I show you this picture nicked from www.thewho.net:

I dont' want to see such holes in my speaker cabinet either :)

Another day in the woods

2008-04-20T10:39:00.012+03:00

Yesterday was a crisp and clear day here, with a little frost in the morning, so my son Ian and I took off to the woods. Ingela and Lukas stayed at home recovering from a recurrent cold. It seems that we won't get rid of those colds this year.
The day started out bad. When driving the muddy road into the woods, I got stuck in the mud at the very place we always park our car, the frost in the soil is giving in to the sunshine and warm days and the road gets very muddy for months to come until mid June. So there we were, the car resting on its very bottom and we had to work for one half hour to get out of there. The whole car was covered with mud and so was Ian :) He reminded me of the boy in "I'm a boy" in some funny way. Then the saw-chain on one of the chainsaws suddenly flew off the chainbar. The oil channel had got jammed with sawdust and when there was not enough oil supported to the chain it got overheated and prolonged and jumped off the bar. Then the harness used to carry the brushsaw broke. Crap, crap, crappetycrap...
This small barn of logs you see in the picture is oh so typical for my home village. In my childhood they were everywhere in the landscape. Along the shores where people cut the grass from the shallow shores and stored in the small barns for the winter, in natural meadows in the middle of the woods and in small fields, worked up by draining bogs and cultivating it into fertile soil. This place in the picture was once a typical case of the latter. Drained and prepared in the middle of the 1930's by my grandfather and his sons.

Now it seems to be in the middle of the woods because these fields were reforrested by me in 1991. My mother stopped farming completely in the late 1960's after my father died in 1966. The fields were then used by her youngest brother until he called it a day in 1990. But it comes in handy as a storage for our stuff and as a lunch-break shelter.
In the second picture you can see what it is like nowadays. Spruce all over the place, interfoliated with birch. They grow fast in this cultivated soil.

Along our way into the woods we pass by a big anthill. One week ago there were no signs of activity there, but yesterday it was a hive of activity. Millions of ants working hard to repair the damages of last winter. The bright and warm sun had pushed them into action. The sun is warm during the days but still last night we had down to 8 degrees below the freezing point. Yesterday evening when we came home I tried to wash the mud off my car but the water started to freeze on the surface of the car. So spring has not really sprung, but it is close now :)

The winter strikes back and other backlashes

2008-04-10T11:15:00.006+03:00

This week started out very rainy and suddenly on Tuesday evening the temperature suddenly dropped several degrees below the freezing point while the raining continued. On Wednesday morning the nature looked like in this photo I nicked from Ingelas' blog

In the evening snow started to fall and this morning when I went to job, our surroundings looked like this picture I have "borrowed" from a traffic information camera close to here

My audio-project ( my wallet to be more exact...) suffered a drawback recently when my intentions to roll my own audio output transformer went down the drain because I would have gone nuts having to wind several thousands of turns of very thin enameled copper wire by hand and having to keep a very exact account of each turn and were to locate them in order to not create unbalance, risk for short circuits etc. and there were no electrical machine repair-shop close by who would have done it for me to a decent cost.
But then I found this site on the web:
http://www.roehrenendstufen.de/
and Herr Ritter rolled a completely brand new transformer for me to my own specifications to a very decent price! All you audio enthusiasts in Europe, Herr Ritter is THE source for all kind of transformers and a lot of other stuff needed when building amplifiers.
Another little drawback is that I found out that my transmitter tube found in my junkbox will not deliver more than 60 - 70 W in audio operation with a decent level of distortion but that won't disturb me much :)
I could go into discussions of operating classes A, B, AB1 and AB2 here to tell you why, but I would go even more boring than usual...

Shapes of things

2008-03-24T16:55:00.004+02:00

Bits and pieces for my amplifier project are piling up in cupboards and in my garage. Today I gathered some of the most important pieces to see how they would fit onto the chassis I bought recently and as you see, there is plenty of room. I could even fit in two power-tubes side by side and as the power transformer is big enough, I could really go for two tubes and reach close to 200 W but that would be slightly overkill in the garage :) Anyway, I may install the second socket for further experiments but leave it empty at the moment.
Behind the preamp and driver section is plenty of room to install reverb- and spring-echo circuits if I want to.

The speaker cabinet is shaping up in my garage. It is built out of pieces cut out of 21 mm. thick plywood of spruce. It is not just a simple box with an open back, It is not an airtight compression box either. It is provided by internal ducts arranged to improve the respons in the bass region. I will not reveal more until I have tuned and tweaked it. The process reminds me of tuning an accoustic guitar. In the end I may fail and then I just convert it to a traditional open (or closed...) box.

The Piggy Bank

2008-03-16T20:20:00.003+02:00

This is our stove in the corner of our livingroom. It is really a kind of piggy bank because it saves us money. It is made by a company called Uunisepät, it would be something like "Stove-Smiths" translated into english. Their website is here: www.uunisepat.fi
If you follow the links to the "Classic" models and then "Nostalgia" you will find some variations and technical details. Our stove is the corner model.
The height is 2.2 meters and the total weight is 1500 kg.
Today, Sunday, we spent another day working in the woods.

Out here in the fields...

2008-02-27T19:14:00.003+02:00

...or might be more specific to say "Out here in the woods..." because we are now spending some days clearing some few kilometers of service road leading deep into a piece of land I own out on the island of Björkö. My life isn't always about designing transformers for a living or building amps, HAM-radio gear, furniture for my wife and PC:s in my spare time.
If you own a piece of forest and you sell wood to the papermills or to a sawmill or you chop trees and use the logs to build a house, it is mandatory to get plants of spruce or pine and get the piece of land re-forested and that also involves the procedure of screening out excessive trees and trees toppled by storms on a regular schedule or at least once in a 10 to 15-year period.
A little piece of my forest is now ripe for harvesting and a lot of it has to be screened. The major part of the screening we are going to carry out ourselves and the trees are going to be logs for the fireplace but before we can go ahead with the project we have to re-open the service-road to be able to get there using a tractor.
It has not been used much since 1994 and there are now growing birches close to 10 cm. in diameter preventing us from getting into the woods.
The schools are out for winter holidays now in ww. 9 here in this region and the whole family is taking part in this effort. I am the one in the middle operating the brush-saw. Closest to the camera is my son Ian, behind him Lukas' girlfriend Jenna and far ahead of me you can see a glimpse of Lukas operating the chainsaw.
Ingela shot the picture and it is nicked from her blog :)

Who came first?

2008-02-20T20:32:00.004+02:00

Haahaa..! I just found a way to relate the headline of my blog to another Pete Townshend product :)
The question "who came first?" is relevant to the project I told you about in my last blog. So here we go: who came first, the hen or the egg? Building a guitar amplifier without a speaker-cabinet is not really a bright idea... Well, the amplifier project is rolling on its own path, still looking for an affordable output transformer because my attempt to roll my own stalled. In the meantime it just hit me I will have to get a speaker cabinet as well. So which one is the hen and which is the egg? Both are needed but which one to build first? I went for the cabinet. 4 x 12" it is gonna be. I found those beauties in the picture in a webshop on eBay.de and the price was perfect. I ordered them at once. Bass-midrange speakers 40 to 7000 Hz at 100W RMS each. Fetch your earplugs folks...

Wire and Glass

2008-02-03T11:09:00.000+02:00

Wire and Glass is something well known to the Wholigans as it actually is a part of the Whos' latest CD "Endless Wire" or to be more specific, the songs related to Townshends' story "The Boy Who Heard Music". Wire and Glass is also relevant to my picture of today. Old Guitar Heroes and Ham-Radio operators can immediately identify the stuff as "Thermionic Tubes" (or "Valves" in the UK) that were used in receivers, transmitters and amplifiers in the good old days of electronics. Tubes are litterally built of small metal sheets, wire and glass, hence the header of this blog.
Hold on a minute, these guys in the picture doesn't seem ancient or even used? No, this stuff is mostly brand new except for the big guy with two "horns" at the left who is a QQE 06/40, maybe some 30 years old but never used. The small guys are two 12AX7 and one 12AU7. The stuff in the background are sockets for the tubes.
So, what am i really going to do with this stuff? The experienced reader maybe has the answer already, Hans is going to build an amplifier. Yes that's true, a while ago my son Lukas asked me about tube amplifiers because his guitar-playing friends had brought this matter up to discussion. You know, there is a never ending discussion going on in the guitar-player community as well as in the Hi-Fi enthusiasts community about tube-sound v.s. transistor-sound.
Sparked off by that discussion I started to dig into my boxes of junk and found this old but never used twin-power tetrode for transmitter use but also OK as audio power amplifier with the same capacity as four pieces of EL34:s or 6L6:s, a good power transformer and some other hardware. The other tubes I bought from a web-shop. There are several factories producing new tubes nowadays in Russia, Slovakia and China to name a few. The tube aint' dead for sure.
One problem in this upcoming project is the output transformer to match the speakers to the power tube. One can find them in web-shops as well but they are scaringly expensive. So I went to the scrap-yard and dug into a container filled with small electrical motors and transformers of all sizes and found one with a core of suitable size for about 100W output power and the price was one (1) Euro.
This is now to be dismantled and rewound. Piece of cake... :)
Maybe we will be able to test "Tube-sound by Hans" before the next Christmas.

Drowned

2008-01-27T17:19:00.000+02:00

"Drowned" is a piece of music from Pete Townhends' "Quadrophenia" and performed by The Who throughout their 2007 tour.
The final line is now decorating our bedroom wall.

A new year...

2008-01-13T10:53:00.000+02:00

A new year and a new life. :) Heehee... What a laugh! Anyway, we are trying hard my wife and me. 11 days of loafing and eating during the Christmas season has done miracles to my body. The very first morning I went to work, January the 2:nd, I stepped onto the scales in the bathroom, the scales protested to the strain and told me "error" and looking into the mirror I saw Droopy Dog staring back at me... :(
Ouch!

The picture of Ingela and me was taken one evening we went for a walk and we have been walking nearly every evening at least 30 minutes each day and we will continue at least until we lose 10 pounds or more. I have lost at least one pound in the first ten days and according to linear extrapolation I would vanish after 1600 days or roughly within 4 1/2 years.
Yeah well, I am not stupid, I am an engineer for heavens sakes and I know that the function of weight loss vs time is more like exponential and losing the next pound would take me about 15 days, the next in 23 days and so on...
Phew...! "It's Hard", quoting my favourite rock-group the Who.

Talking about rock music, my blogger friend Val wished me music for 2008 and music there will be, there is plenty of music nowadays in this house. My son Lukas bought a Guitar and amplifier combo for money he earned last summer and he is playing the guitar almost every day. It is a Gibson SG-clone, a Harley Benton from the house of Thomann in Germany. One could believe it is just another cheap copy made in China, the 20W amp and guitar combo is about USD 300, but this guitar is very good both in finish and sound. Very sturdy and good mechanics. The bridge is a real tune-o-matic and according to one of my musical friends, who has been playing guitar since he was a toddler, tells me that the guitar alone outperforms many other guitars he have seen, worth USD 600 or more.
Everytime he drops in here he pics up the SG, tunes it up, and plays for some 20 minutes, eyes closed... :)
My youngest son Ian is frequently strumming along on the old Yamaha accoustic guitar.

Bruce Springsteen is coming to Finland this summer, he is going to play the Helsinki Olympic Stadium the 11:th of July. We have got the tickets booked and we are now going to listen through all his back catlogue and also the new releases for the months to come. Sorry Pete & Rog... :)
Ingela and me have done a very funny exchange of music during our marriage, she has became a Wholigan and I've turned out to dig Bruce Springsteen. I was a Who-fan and had a hard time to get Ingela to listen to them. I did not really like Springsteen much but got to like him when listening to Ingelas records, finding stuff I never knew about.
This is how marriage should work, isn't it?