Update

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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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

...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?

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

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

"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...

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?

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to you all in blogland!

The shortest day...

...and the longest night is tomorrow December 22. At this time of the year we have only about 5 hours of something one could call daylight here at 63 degrees North.
It is really some few hours of dawn transmogrifying into some few hours of dusk.
In between there is 19 hours of darkness.
There is a webcam out at the Replot Bridge about 10 miles northwest from Vaasa and there you can see how dark it really gets here.
Replot Bridge WebCam
Well today it is a beautiful day and the sun is shining though it is moving so low behind the trees from my point of sight so I cannot really see it from here where I sit.

If you are watching this webcam you may wonder where is the snow and the ice?
Yes, so do we. This is another exceptional year when there is no snow and ice around. No hope for a White Christmas this year.
There were two occasions when this have happened before, in 1972 and 1992. Please observe that these are the only occasions in modern history here and now a third one in less than 40 years.
Something about the climate is changing very rapidly now.

Anyway, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year out there in blogland!

Fighting for Public Radio

When I was listening to Radio London, Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg and even operated my own pirate-radio station in my teens, I couldn't imagine, not even in my worst nightmares, that I one day would find myself fighting for the existence of a Public Radio station.
Public Radio is a form of society or governement operated radio and TV that should serve the people with social, cultural and educational information interleaved with news and entertainment.
Most of the ether-media in Europe was and still is operated like that. Fundings for Public Radio is generally collected in the shape of something called "TV-fee" or "TV-license" and for the moment being it is around 230 EUR p.a. and household in Finland.
All the material is broadcast as "Free To Air" and can be received by anyone without encryption etc., the finnish brodcasting company is called Yleisradio - Rundradion, abbreviated YLE
In the 1980:s the broadcasting law was changed to allow commercial competition (okey, there had been commercials in Finnish TV long before as one company called "Mainos TV" or MTV hired transmittertime from YLE who thereby got some of their fundings) and people started escaping the TV-fee because "they did not watch /listen to Public Service TV/radio". Later on YLE disconnected their transmitter network from their core business, formed a transmitter company called Digita and sold it to a french broadcasting company who let the commercial stations into their broadcasting masts.

This flight from the TV-fee mentioned above got sharply accentuated this year when all the Public Radio went digital and some people on the fringe of the transmitter coverage found themselves without any picture in their TV-sets and/or malfunctioning subtitles/sound despite upgrading to new digital TVs and set-top-boxes. This digitalization process has been induced and directed from the top governement in a way that seems to be a carbon-copy of the way they produced and operated their 5-years plans in the former USSR.
Last week the management of the YLE declared that they are lacking another 50000 TV-fees this year and they have to cut down their operations, two radio channels and one TV-channel have to be closed down.

The thing that got me going was that one of the channels was the swedish-speaking youth-radio, Radio x3m.
That channel was established 10 years ago when the youth programs grew too big inside the one and only existing swedish speaking channel then.

You may wonder why a swedish speaking channel in Finland? Finland is a bilingual country with two national languages, finnish and swedish, as defined in the constitution from 1918. The citizens should be treated equal despite language and thats why YLE has been working using both languages from the very beginning. As per beginning of 2006 there were 6 finnish speaking radio channels and 4 finnish speaking TV-channels operated by the YLE, 2 swedish speaking radio channels and one swedish speaking TV-channel operated by the same.
There are dozens of commercial TV and radio channels, none of them broadcasting in swedish.
The big problem is that we swedes in Finland are hardly 300000 people out of 5 millions anymore and as such too small a group to be interesting to any commercial company. The other problem is that we are dispersed in some thin, elongated areas isolated from eachother on the south, southwest and west-coast i. And the Aland islands of course but they have their own autonomy and that area is by law unilingual and swedish-speaking.
At the west coast here arond the city of Vasa we could watch TV and listen to radio from Sweden before there were any finnish TV-transmitter in our region and that of course turned us closer to swedish culture, tradition and politics than in southern Finland where they could not watch TV from Sweden.
Up to the introduction of Radio x3m, swedish speaking youth from different parts of Finland did not really know much about eachother. Me myself was continuously listening to the P3, the youth-channel in Sweden but after some few years after the introduction of Radio x3m I found that I had switched to that channel on all fronts, in the car, at the summerhouse and at home.

Now this channel uniting all the young swedish speaking people in Finland was threatened. People reacted spontaneously, they wrote to the newspapers, they gathered on web-communities, they wrote petitions, they demonstrated on the streets and outside the YLE-building, they collected lists of names and they bombarded the parliament and governement with e-mails and I was one of them.
The political establishment went into shock, the reaction from the grassroots was totally unexpected and the propositions to axe the Radio x3m were withdrawn in a hurry last tuesday evening.

But, the problem with the lack of fundings still remains and we are told that one TV-channel has to go and that YLE has to further cut down their news-departement to save money.

YLE in english
Radio x3m web community

Amazing Journey

The movie. It finally arrived! A fascinating documentary about one of the greatest Rock-bands that ever existed: The Who

Can you see the writing on the wall?

We redecorated the house a little while ago and we quoted Pete Townshend and "Relax" on one of the walls of our living room. On one of the walls in our hallway you can read: "Come to this house, be one of us!" Are we Who-fans or are we just nuts?
By the way, my wife Ingela has posted some nice pictures again, go there and give her a shoutout:

Ingelas blog

Applescrumping anyone...?

Well, I don't think this apple is inviting to any such activity. :)
The picture is nicked from my wife, Ingela, and it describes the general mood and weather here right now.
This is the very last species of apple still clinging onto a branch on one of our appletrees. It is partly rotten, it is nibbled by the birds and deep-frozen but it still hangs in there, probably waiting for the next summer as I do.... :)
Ingela is posting a new picture every day, she blogs in swedish but you can comment in english if you want to. No need to understand the context.
http://alegniinoffice.blogspot.com/

It's a sad day....

At least 7 people killed in a school shooting in Tuusula some 30 miles north of Helsinki. The shooter is a 18 years old student. This is not America, this is Finland for heavens sake and such things's wouldn't happen here, would they?

The shooter is known to have been hanging on internet sites admiring Hitler and Stalin and posted videos onto YouTube of himself training handling of and shooting with a handgun.

I really don't know how to interprete my feelings about things like this and the obvious connection to Internet lighting the fire of sick minds.

Pete Townshend wrote an essay named "a Different Bomb" in the beginning of this millennium where he exposed his ambivalence regarding the Internet and the usage of the same. I then thought his perception to be very dark and grim but a day like this I am prepared to believe him.

Please light a candle for the pupils, teachers and parents tonight.

Offshore Radio

aka Pirate Radio is something that have fascinated me since my early teenages. It is also one of the major operators that made the Brittish R&R and pop-music explosion possible from early 1964.
This issue has got new actuality recently when both Pete and Roger of The Who both have given credit to Radio London and Radio Caroline for their immediate success in recent interviews.

Radio in Europe was something else than radio in the US back then, in most countries there was "public radio" only operated by governement owned monopoly and there was not much space for popular music programs and/or teenager oriented programs.
Commercial radio was not allowed except in Luxembourg but Radio Luxembourg was more or less in the hands of some few big record labels and did not provide much room for young emerging artists.
One method to overcome this was to launch a transmitter on international waters and that was what happened in the spring 1964 when Ronan O´Rahilly launched Radio Caroline.
You can read about my adventures on the airwaves in the mid-sixties here:
http://www.radiolondon.co.uk/rl/scrap60/hansa/hansqsl.html

If you Google using search phrases as "Offshore Radio", "Radio Caroline", "Radio Nord", "Radio Veronica", "Radio London" etc. you will find a lot of information.
Hans Knot in the Netherlands is THE information source:
http://www.hansknot.com
another good source is Martin van der Vens "Offshore Radio":
http://www.offshoreradio.de

HTPC anyone?

We recently bought a digital-TV set-top box (DVB-C) with a built-in harddisk-drive so one can record programs or time-shift programs when needed.
Now when there is streaming-TV of all kind out there on the web it would be nice to integrate that also into one and the same gadget along with DVD-player-burner. Normal web-surfing in the sofa on the 37" screen would be nice also when there is nothing on the telly.
I decided a while ago that I will try to build my own multimedia-PC and also integrate Digital-TV into the same.
My first preference is low power consumption so it will be built around stuff commonly used in Lap-Tops, my second preference is cheap.
Cheap and laptop components don't really fit together so I must search auction-sites for used or refurbished stuff. That takes a lot of time, trying to get MoBos and CPU:s to a low price.
Then one should find a reliable PCI-card for cable-TV reception here in Europe. The market seems to be small and there isn't much (cheap) stuff around on web-auctions.
But when I've gathered the components I will start to build this fancy apparatus. :)

Anyone out there with experiences from such a project?

Helsinki DVD

Wow! It finally arrived, the DVD from The Who's show in Helsinki the 9:th of July.
What a great show it was!

Ingela's new slideshow

Ingela put up a new slideshow on Myspace today. http://www.myspace.com/alegni
The slideshow contains pictures from our life and surroundigs, the thing is that every picture is named after a The Who - tune!
:)

Please go there and give her a shoutout!

continued: summer 07

A helicopter-view of the area where we travel by boat to our summerhouse. In the foreground you see the marina of Björkö where our dinghy is moored. This picture is on the front cover of the application for inclusion in the World heritage List.
Photo by Arto Hämäläinen / Geonat Project
More information regarding Kvarken can be found here:
http://www.kvarkenguide.org/mainen.html
Choose "Björkö Archipelago" from the drop-down list.






Late in the evening at our summer house






Calm sea






The beacon at Svartbådan






Sunset






Approaching Svedjehamn






A basinful of perch (Perca Fluviatilis) The most common fish in the waters surrounding our summerhouse






The pot of gold is in our garden shed but please don't tell anyone...





Most of the pictures are of course taken by Ingela

The OH6MY multiband loop-dipole-hybrid antenna

In the previous post I described an antenna I built this summer and found to be working on all the classical WARC bands. 30 meters (10 MHz) would theoretically also be possible but I did not investigate that option.
I promised to upload some phots here so here they come:











In the first photo you see the antenna from behind, the feedpoint is closest to the birch in the middle of the picture.
In the second photo you can see the feedpoint to the left and also get an impression of the layout of the antenna with the 1/4 wavelenght stubs in the corners of the square-shaped loop.
The dimensions you may find in my earlier text. One ft is 0.305 meters.

Edit Nov. 18 2008:
As I see that I get many hits to this antenna-blog I will paste the text from the preceeding blog here:
The basic OH6MY multiband antenna for 40 - 10 m. is as follows:
-the base is a square-shaped loop for 40 m, installed parallell to the ground
-1/4 wavelenght stubs (on 40m) added in two opposite corners.
-the antenna will resonate as a dipole on 80 m. as well if there are some 2.5 m "whiskers" added to the shorted ends of the stubs
-antenna wire is 2 mm diameter enamelled Cu-wire
-each side of the loop is 11.1 m.
-each stub is 9.1 m. of polyethylene coated 450 ohm ladder line or (theoretically) 10.1 m home-made 450 ohm ladder made from the same wire as the antenna. I built this using the polyethylene coated line.
I built and tested at approx 8 m. above ground at my summer house (sorry Ingela...)the stubs in the corners are falling down perpendiculary to the plane of the antenna for some few meters and then sloping sidways-outwards, the shorted ends are at approx. 1 m. above ground. Added 2.5 m. of the same wire to the end of the stubs, parallell with the ground to bring it into 80 m.
Different heights and/or ground properties would need slightly different stub lengths, start with 9.5 m and search for the point of resonance on 40 m by moving the shorting point upwards in increments of 5 - 10 cm. The resonance is fairly sharp. Whenever it is in resonance on 40 m. it will be on the upper bands as well.

If you bild and test this antenna, please give me a shoutout per e-mail at:
hans.astrom@netikka.fi

73:s
Hans

Summer of 07

I am back at work. The summer was great despite the rainy final week of my summer holidays.

New engine for me dinghy.
I had a brand new Westerbeke 20B, 18 Hp Marine-Diesel installed in my old 21 ft dinghy this spring. The fuel consumption is only half of what it used to be in my 48 years old petrol-powered engine. And the diesel fuel is much cheaper. The low fuel consumption caused us trouble some days ago when we went out to our summerhouse one evening after work when the temperature here started to reach 30 oC here on the mainland. I had completely forgot that routine of checking the fuel left in the tank and on our way back in the sunset, the engine stalled after 10 minutes. The tank was almost empty and driving at cruise-speed made the bow rise to an angle thad got the fuel left run away from the fuel outet. I had to dive into the bulkhead in the bow and get to the tank, jacked it up and tilted it forward using Ingela's slippers so the fuel left could reach the outlet. The cruise continued at some hefty 4 knots and at that speed (well below hull-speed) the boat remained in a level position and the fuel flow was secured.

Computer crashes several.
I had to finalise some documents at home in the beginning of my holidays so I brought my laptop home. It crashed immediately upon bootup. Harddisk trouble. Got it up and working after running diagnostics, CHKDSK and fixing MBR.
Ingelas fairly new laptop (2 years old)crashed one Monday morning. No warranty left. One IC in the internal power supply on the motherboard had erupted, cause unknown. Maybe overvoltage on the main supply, modern switching PSU:s are a pain in the butt. Good old transformers in the front end of PSU:s would save many vulnerable pieces of electronics from being destroyed at home.
Repair at the producers European repair-shop would cost as much as a new laptop with the same specifications. So I built her a new desktop computer instead. I later on found a motherboard for the laptop, used and in working order, on the eBay in UK and I will put the laptop together again any rainy weekend now.
Upon returning to work my laptop crashed again after some few hours. The HDD went FUBAR this time and I am now waiting for a new laptop.

The Who gave a un-f*cking-believable good show in Helsinki. You can find my comments on that further below in this blog.
We are now eagerly waiting for the DVD from that show to show up in our mailbox :)

Another evening we went to the outdoor summer-theatre in Närpes to see a show. All the actors involved are mostly amateurs and what a good show it was.

As much time as possible got spent at the summer-house. July was though a very rainy month here in Finland as well as in many other places in Europe but as usual, the weather out in the middle of the sea between Finland and Sweden is much sunnier than on the mainland where afternoon and evening showers are common.

A new antenna concept for the HF-bands.
All HAM:s (amateur radio operators) know that there is no real multiband-HF-antenna that fulfills all the criteria that could be put down for such a beast:
-resonant (Z = R +-j0) inside all (or the most of) the "classical" WARC- bands like 80, 40 ,20, 15 and 10 m.
- SWR less than 1:3 when resonant, that means R in between 17 to 150 ohms when operated at 50 ohms output which reduces the need for complex matching devices.
Well folks, that is the antenna I built and tested this summer! the OH6MY antenna. Hit the road G5RV and W3DZZ... :)
It all started several years ago when experimenting and testing different loop-antennas for 40 m. in co-operation with my old friend Lars, SM5GQV, former OH6MX, to get a satisfactory configuration to be able to have regular contacts on the airwaves between our QTH:s, he is living in Norrköping, Sweden. This path is a little tricky, sometimes very good propagations on 40 m, sometimes on 80 m and sometimes not at all.
The problem is the space needed for loops, the easiest way is to hang it horisontally but that usually means that it is hanging parallell to the ground at close to 1/4 wavelenght and the radiation will take off at 90 degress vertically. Good for local QSO:s but not for longer distaces and DX-ing.
So, the main objective was to create a loop that could hang at a low level parallell to the ground and have as low radiation angle as possible.
The radiation problem is solved by shifting the phase of the current maximums 180 degrees, then we have radiation in the same plane as the loop with current maximums at the feedpoint and opposite to it. We are from here on discussing a loop shaped as a SQUARE, fed at one corner.
My idea for the phase shift was to insert shorted 1/4-wave stubs at the corners adjacent to the feedpoint and having voltage maximum. A shorted stub is an isolator at its other end and thus perfect for insertion in the voltage maximum point.
Two 1/4-wave stubs introduces a total of 180 degrees phase shift and that is what I wanted. The 1/4-wave stubs are made of 450 ohm ladder-line.
I then modelled this creation into the 4NEC2 (based on MININEC )software, heigth about 8 meters above normal ground and got really promising results when running the simulations.
The radiation angels were as expected and the impedance at 40 m. was much closer to 50 ohm than i a normal 40 m. loop.
The real surprise was that I in the simulations also could find resonances inside the 20, 15 and 10 meters as well! Even in the 6 m. band :)
Everybody trying to get a normal 40 m loop to resonate in the upper bands knows that the resonance points are well below those upper bands.
And the most surprising finding was that this antenna shows some kind of folded-dipole resonance immediately above 80 m. as well and that I could bring this into the 80 m. band by adding a 2.5 m "whisker" to the shorted end of the stubs without affecting the resonance on the other bands and that the impedance was close to 50 ohm at 80 m. as well!

The basic OH6MY multiband antenna for 40 - 10 m. is as follows:
-antenna wire is 2 mm diameter enamelled Cu-wire
-each side of the loop is 11.1 m.
-each stub is 9.1 m. of polyethylene coated 450 ohm ladder line or (theoretically) 10.1 m home-made 450 ohm ladder made from the same wire as the antenna. I built this using the polyethylene coated line.
I built and tested at approx 8 m. above ground at my summer house (sorry Ingela...)the stubs in the corners are falling down perpendiculary to the plane of the antenna for some few meters and then sloping sidways-outwards, the shorted ends are at approx. 1 m. above ground. Added 2.5 m. of the same wire to the end of the stubs, parallell with the ground to bring it into 80 m.
Different heights and/or ground properties would need slightly different stub lengths, start with 9.5 m and search for the point of resonance on 40 m by moving the shorting point upwards in increments of 5 - 10 cm. The resonance is fairly sharp. Whenever it is in resonance on 40 m. it will be on the upper bands as well.
I have tested and worked several QSO:s and it is resonant on all bands and the radiation angle on 40m is very low, in fact too low for me and SM5GQV because from my QTH I hear German and Italian stations on 40 much louder than I hear him. On 80 we have had good QSO:s despite the very low erection for a 80 m. dipole.
I heard stations from the Middle East and the US one evening on 20 m. Did not try to work them because I am only running some 20 - 30 watts from an IC-706 and a old car battery.
I will post some pictures of this creature here from home later on.

73:s es GL

OH6MY aka Hans

Home again

Home again after a birilliant show.
I added some more picterus of Zak, roger and Pete.
The most of our pictures you can find in my Myspace site in "my Pictures" at http://www.myspace.com/oh6my
Those who are not memebers of myspace can enjoy the slideshow but there is a lot of other stuff too so be patient :)
Hans












Edit 11.07.2007

The setlist was approximately like this:

I Can't Explain
The Seeker
Anyway Anyhow Anywhere
Fragments
Who Are You
Behind Blue Eyes
Real Good Looking Boy
Baba O'Riley
Relay
Drowned
A Man In A Purple Dress
You Better You Bet
My Generation
Won't Get Fooled Again

Encore
The Kids Are Alright
Pinball Wizard
Amazing Journey
Sparks
See Me Feel Me
Tea And Theatre

I must have been very excited because I found it hard to remember the setlist immediately after the show, It was easier to create it backwards from what they did not play :)
The last finishing I got from the message board at thewhotour.com were one community member had put this list on and I checked it against my memory.

The Who rocked Helsinki

The Who rocked Helsinki tonight, the band was in the form of their life and Roger´s voice was nearly as good as new!
I will return with a complete setlist when I´ve calmed down and that could last for a few days. :)
We sat in the second row opposite Pete and the pictures above are taken by my wife, Ingela, or at least with her camera. The camera was operated by everybody in the famiy to get some good shots from different angles.
My boys got a plectrum each and the younger one one of Zak´s drumsticks.
We are very happy!
Thank you guys!

The Who...

...will enter the stage at Hartwall Arena in Helsinki within a few hours. Maybe for the very last time ever if I read Pete´s last blog between the lines OK.
We have been staying in Helsinki for a few days, shopping and enjoying ourselves. The weather suddenly took a turn to the better this afternoon, just in time for the concert, well, it is an indoor event but anyway, nice weather is always a bonus.

Ready for maximum R&B

Got the tickets for the Who show at the Hartwall Arena in Helsinki today. See ya there! Ingela ordered the T-shirt with the RAF bullseye for me. She is so kind, isn´t she?

Meet (me and) my sons

Here is a photo of me and my sons taken recently, from the left: Lukas, the 16-year-old icehockey goalie, myself, and Ian, the 14-year-old kickboxer.

In the second picture is my oldest son Markus documenting some details of his own art exhibition in the city of Tampere last winter.