Lethargic, procrastinating and cold

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!

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

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

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 :)

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

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

...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

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.... :(

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

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?

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

Relax

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

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

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

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 :)