Our baby boy is 18 today!

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

Dad

A piece of my radio history

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

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

 

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

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

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

Farewell old home...

I sold the place where I was born yesterday. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hans