John Williams - VK4JJW

John Williams - VK4JJW

John Williams - VK4JJW

 
 

Anchor Desk

G'day

Amateur Radio has been my thing continuously since gaining a licence at the end of 1965 ...

Moved up and down the east coast of Australia a bit, mainly on the voice side of the mike in the radio broadcasting industry for about 20 years, followed by over 30 years of working for myself (more likely for she_who_must_be_obeyed), mainly in professional sound recording and more recently since 1995 adding the newer ISP bizz. Do a bit of consultancy work from time-to-time, but then isn't that what everyone does when they get a bit of "real world" experience and they're "over 40".

Starting off with virtually nothing but those glass things that had lights in them instead of beer I can still remember my first rig back in Melbourne when the automobile had this 2 metre battery burner (23 valves, or tubes) Xtal locked on just one simplex frequency. No repeaters then so we had to really make sure everything was optimised. Still have the trusty old FT101 from back in the days when the "full call" was obtained, and that's even been used in conjunction with a home brew transverter on 6M SSB. At the moment that complete system is in a state of "refurbishment". And simply because an FT897 magically appeared on the scene towards the end of 2013, a "long wire" was strung up and in conjunction with a home brew tuner allowed us to get on all bands from 160 thru 6. Verticals with gain made 2M and 70cm available too.  Feb 2014, and using Paul VK3DIP's fabulous YagiCAD program, the old 2M and 6M horizontal beams were dusted off, refurbished and attached to an Armstrong rotator. The neighbours surely would've been wondering what was going on with their constantly changing skyline.

Start of 2015 and off to Queensland and Mundoolun, a quiet little country centre 45 minutes from the big smoke of Brisbane. It's a different story, so far. A bit of HF with the long wire, and occasional 2M FM contacts, however the VHF beams will have to wait until we get a few other more "generally important" things sorted, as she describes them, in our "new" abode. I'm sure you know what THAT means ;-)

Currently active with IRLP and the (relatively) newer EchoIRLP, a means of using the Linux based IRLP stuff to run EchoLink connections. This is primarily for promoting Amateur Radio to the "listening" masses, achieved in part by running re-transmissions of some of the World's popular Amateur news broadcasts, including Newsline of course which we've been doing now for well over the last ten years from three different states of Australia each time we've moved house.  Have learned heaps about bash scripting and what NOT to do - considering that I work with computers most of the time, it makes for a bit of a change from the normal day-to-day stuff. And this is from a guy who back in the 90's didn't want to know about these digital demons.

Because time seems to be something of which there's never enough, and the fact that it's gradually running out, the main interest is now directed towards learning as much as possible about everything that's been put off until I have the time - if you get my drift!

 

Cheers,

JW

Callsign: VK4JJW