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/