Morse Mars

Who thought Morse Code was dead and buried with all the digital technology?  Not so...NASA has included a message in Morse Code in the track of Curiosity the Mars rover, where as we speak, is leaving the message JPL permantly on the surface of Mars wherever it goes!

What a great idea!

It is fun to listen to Morse QSO's on the bands, this skill is not dead, but is an important way of communicating when all else fails. Last night I listened to the contest on 50Mhz and heard a few times when the QSO was difficult and reverted to sending the contest info in Morse...why not!
I still have my key, and I still know how to use it!
I am now waiting for a good Auroral opening, I have worked lots of stations before during Auroral activity using morse code, it sounds like a 'buzzsaw' during Auroral contacts.

Twin town link up

Couldn't believe it today when my Dad rang me to tell me that there was a photo of of me in newspaper from 1974. A photo of me with long hair!
I remember when this photo was taken, I went with Neil G3ZPL to Bills's house to set up a link between the Mayor of Paderborne in Germany, the Mayor of Le Mans in France and the Mayor of Bolton. The Bolton Evening News also came to take photos. It was a glorious Spring morning nad Neill picked me me up in his Hilman Imp car. We drove down St Peter's Way to Farnworth with all the widows open singing 'MaMa were all crazy now!' When we arrived at Bills house the photographer was there, but no Mayor!
In the end we went on 20 metres with Bills KW2000 and Linear and talked with Paderborne and Le Mans (our twin towns) on the radio. I remember that the link was quite poor and a lot of QRM and QSB.

Bolton was well populated with radio hams in 1974.
They were amateur broadcasters with 100ftpieces of wire strung over the rooftops as an aerial.
The previous Christmas about 20 of them - members of the Bolton and District Amateur Radio Society - had set up their own twin chatting arrangements with the french town of Le Mans.
It was all done from the home of Bill Moran (G3XUM) Each Sunday at about 9am the first call sign G8WY/A went out to make contact with the Le Mans signal - F8GE
Bill Moran, left, is pictured operating his transmitter with fellow members Neil Richardson and secretary Stephen Macdonald.

Olympics at last!

Well, last night was amazing!
I watched the Olympic opening ceremony all the way through and it was incredible! The technology that went into the ceremony was mind blowing with the lights, projections and special effects. There must have been an army of technicians on site as the scene was transformed from an English countryside to the industrial revolution with the chimneys and how on earth did they forge the Olympic rings with the awesome special effects? As well as Mr Bean, we also saw the guy that invented the World Wide Web and this should be celebrated as it has changed the world...trouble is that I can't remember his name!
The music was chosen well and David Bowie played Heros as the Team GB came into the stadium at the end of the team procession...couldn't have chosen it better!

Well done Danny Boyle!  A true down to earth Radcliffe man with a great northern insiration. My wife Kathleen comes from Radcliffe and i'm sure he knows her family! The Olivers were well known in Radcliffe.

This is a once in a lifetime event that should be remembered!

I got a Raspberry Pi

I waited weeks, but here it is...my very own Raspberry Pi!

I'm not sure what to make of it yet, I haven't connected it and don't really know what to do with it yet. I just had to get one because it brings back memories of my first attempts in computer programming.

I remember going on a night school course at BIHE in Bolton to learn abot BASIC programming on a huge PDP11 computer with punch tape to save my work. Later, when I was doing my degree with the Open University, they sent me a computer to use for my course. It didn't have an operating system and used an 8080 CPU, I had to programme it in 'assembly' language and was fun to use.

Now when I got my Sinclair Spectrum I learned to programme in BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL and even Machine Code. I think my 'peak' was when I was able to write programmes in Machine Code to control an interface that controlled my Modem. I was able to auto-dial and auto answer communication on what is now the Internet.

It should be fun to use the Raspberry Pi!

Swedish Welcome!

On the day that the Olympic Torch left Bolton for its journey around the country our Swedish visitors arrived just too late to see the Olympic flame. It was 11.30am when I collected Birgitta, Linnea, Elsa and Malva from the train station in Bolton and took them to the Holiday Inn where they will stay.

When we arrived I noticed some vehicles with the Olympic colours and logos in the car park and people with the Olympic tracksuits. The hotel was being used for the team to stay overnight. We sat talking and welcoming our Swedish family when two people sitting next to us pulled out an Olympic torch! Gosh! brilliant! We all had our photos taken holding the torch...

What a wonderful welcome...Thank You!

Birgitta and her family came to visit us after we 'found' each other again on Facebook. I last met Birgitta 39 years ago in 1973 when we met on holiday in Eastbourne. We wrote to each other afterwards for many years. 

Olympic Torch

Gosh! I never thought I would experience this...the Olympic Torch Relay coming to Bolton just before the london Olympics in 2012.
I watched the torches live on the tv feed as it made it's way from Lands End and now at last it has arrived here. The torch was due to arrive in Bolton Town Centre, but the roads leading to the town were mostly blocked, so we went to the bottom of Junction Road at Wigan Road as the flame made it's way from Westhoughton. The atmosphere was was fantastic and it was also a changover point for the torches. Steve Watson was getting ready to receive the flame.

Melissa was also here and she watched very excited!
This is a once in a life experience even for someone like Melissa...amazing!

Sinclair Spectrum - 30 Years Old!

In 1982 after a lot of thought and constant mind changing I bought myself a Sinclair Spectrum 48k Computer. At the time I had looked at lots of other machines including the 'Oric', 'Dragon' and 'Lynx' computers, but was finally persuaded (rightly) by a friend to go for the Spectrum. The best thing I ever did! When I bought it Sinclair dropped the price of the 48k machine by £50 to £125....so off I went to W.H.Smiths to buy one. I even took some time off work expecting a huge queue, but no, only me. I asked the girl expecting that they had already sold out, but she smiled and went to get one. YES!!! I couldn't believe it...off I went to take it to work to try it out!

Now instead of writing more, this guy says it all, so I am quoting this from his blog... Thank you Michael Hanlon...you have said it all!

The Sinclair Spectrum - 30 today

"If there is something guaranteed to make a 47-year-old chap feel old, it is to be told that the first computer he ever got his hands on is 30 today. THIRTY! That’s how long ago Clive Sinclair released his groundbreaking ZX Spectrum home computer, a machine that was the future, once. And like millions I bought one, at the rather grand price of £125.

This was the bizarre false dawn of home computing, when a slew of standalone machines flooded the market, all mutually incompatible, incapable of being networked without some serious soldering and bought by people for the most part unaware of what to do with them. And nevertheless, we loved these strange gizmos which you plugged into the telly and required software to be downloaded via a cassette deck.
The Spectrum was far cleverer than most, and came in a natty black case that shrieked ‘Year 2000” and had a clever (and, crucially, cheap) rubberised one-piece keypad. It was the iPad of its day, well-made, hugely desirable and very stylish; I remember queues in the shops and fawning news items about this British marvel. This was a rare industrial success story at a time when unemployment was at a postwar high.
But what was it for? Playing games, that’s what. Yes you could buy a printer but I remember the results came on shiny four-inch-wide paper and no one pretended this was any kind of serious business machine. But at its heart lurked a fairly powerful processor (by the standards of the day) and a stripped-out operating system that allowed young and clever programmers too work wonders, creating innovative games with colour 3D graphics and wrestling every last pixel of resolution out of its primitive graphics hardware.

It is probably down to machines like the Spectrum, its predecessor the ZX81 and the Tangerine, an even more basic computer, that Britain led the world in the lucrative computer games industry (it is not widely appreciated that mega-successes such as ‘Grand Theft Auto’ are, despite their American ambience, as British as Wallace and Gromit. If you could program a machine like a Spectrum then you could program just about anything, and a whole generation of young programmers took full advantage.
Sadly I was not among their number. I had some friends who mastered the intricacies of machine code but my brain was just not up to it. I played other people’s games on my Spectrum for a year or so then the thing was packed away neatly in its box and forgotten. I have no idea what happened to it.
The early 1980s was an odd time in the computing age. The technology had advanced to the stage where machines that could fit on a table top were cheap enough to be sold to the public, yet there was no real computing architecture to support a true IT revolution. It was as though someone invented a car in a world where there there were no roads. You turn on an iPad and it’s all there – the all-powerful, all-singing Interweb, so intuitive now that five year olds have no problem. But turn on a Spectrum and you got a white screen – and a cursor. The fact that anyone managed to get the thing to play Space Invaders and the like was something of a miracle. I believe someone even managed to connect a Spectrum to the Internet once; the poor old thing must have had the shock of its life."

I can go one further than this...I did use my Spectrum on the primitive Internet and I also used machine code to programme it!