- Joined
- Jan 1, 2000
- Messages
- 35,626
- Reaction score
- 8,587
- Points
- 113
- Age
- 59
- Website
- www.sat-elite.uk
- My Satellite Setup
- A little less analogue, and a lot more crap.
- My Location
- UK
Strictly receive only (at least what was in the house). It all started out at five years old with an electronics kit from Philips consisting of resistors, waxy capacitors, OC71 diodes, a coil or three, an LDR, some AF116/AC128 Germanium transistors and an earpiece.
My father then got me a day out at the University of Surrey, hoodwinking a group dealing with gifted children that I was a candidate at some ridiculously young age, eight or nine I think. So I spent the day burning myself with a soldering iron and made a touch sensitive sound generator.
Then at age 11, whilst the folks were out, a neighbour in car with a trailer containing five televisions (Bermuda Ultras) parked up outside and asked me if I was interested. I said yes - of course - and three hours later he delivered about forty-five more, including a couple of Philips G series and put them in our back garden. I managed to fix up about ten by swapping valves and dropper resistors, electrocuting myself a few times more than I care to recall .
Sold them via the local scout jumble sale and this got me the knowhow to buy a lot of hifi separates for not a lot of money and fix them in the physics department at school. Spent any money coming in by newspaper rounds on issues of Everyday Electronics and paying for veroboard and stuff from the local electrical scrap merchant who was operating from a shop in Kingston. I would buy the BB Babani books on 'parlour projects' and blag interesting circuit boards in his bargain bin from which I could liberate components, building a number of projects which would - more often than not, - be used generate high voltages to shock fellow pupils, generate jacobs ladder effects or make interesting sounds.
Then I got into mopeds at sixteen, and built a capacitor discharge ignition system (meant for a 12v coil delivery). In connecting it up to the magneto and kicking the engine over, the step up ratio gave me an estimated 40kv at the spark plug of which I was holding at the time, throwing me across the living room. Once I was independent on two wheels I met up with a couple of people that ran a pirate radio station in South London, delivering tapes from the 'live OB's' back to the studio where they could be played about ten minutes later on FM stereo, then taking watch on the roof to pull in the aerial (s) so to avoid the Home office on the way to raid the apartment (Eric Gotts ?)
Left school and went to college for a Higher Diploma - surprisingly they let me loose with more soldering irons and their state of the art tools - where my first year project was a morse code converter - key in/alphanumeric display out, based on a Motorola 6800 processor.
From there it's all been downhill, hoodwinking others on sites like this that I actually know what I am talking about, though I have as of late started visiting the local amateur radio club, and bought a couple of two way stuff from eBay. I willone day get round to passing a licence, but currently I don't have the time to do anything remotely linked to it.
My father then got me a day out at the University of Surrey, hoodwinking a group dealing with gifted children that I was a candidate at some ridiculously young age, eight or nine I think. So I spent the day burning myself with a soldering iron and made a touch sensitive sound generator.
Then at age 11, whilst the folks were out, a neighbour in car with a trailer containing five televisions (Bermuda Ultras) parked up outside and asked me if I was interested. I said yes - of course - and three hours later he delivered about forty-five more, including a couple of Philips G series and put them in our back garden. I managed to fix up about ten by swapping valves and dropper resistors, electrocuting myself a few times more than I care to recall .
Sold them via the local scout jumble sale and this got me the knowhow to buy a lot of hifi separates for not a lot of money and fix them in the physics department at school. Spent any money coming in by newspaper rounds on issues of Everyday Electronics and paying for veroboard and stuff from the local electrical scrap merchant who was operating from a shop in Kingston. I would buy the BB Babani books on 'parlour projects' and blag interesting circuit boards in his bargain bin from which I could liberate components, building a number of projects which would - more often than not, - be used generate high voltages to shock fellow pupils, generate jacobs ladder effects or make interesting sounds.
Then I got into mopeds at sixteen, and built a capacitor discharge ignition system (meant for a 12v coil delivery). In connecting it up to the magneto and kicking the engine over, the step up ratio gave me an estimated 40kv at the spark plug of which I was holding at the time, throwing me across the living room. Once I was independent on two wheels I met up with a couple of people that ran a pirate radio station in South London, delivering tapes from the 'live OB's' back to the studio where they could be played about ten minutes later on FM stereo, then taking watch on the roof to pull in the aerial (s) so to avoid the Home office on the way to raid the apartment (Eric Gotts ?)
Left school and went to college for a Higher Diploma - surprisingly they let me loose with more soldering irons and their state of the art tools - where my first year project was a morse code converter - key in/alphanumeric display out, based on a Motorola 6800 processor.
From there it's all been downhill, hoodwinking others on sites like this that I actually know what I am talking about, though I have as of late started visiting the local amateur radio club, and bought a couple of two way stuff from eBay. I willone day get round to passing a licence, but currently I don't have the time to do anything remotely linked to it.
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