Maj-Lis and I now live in a small end-of-terrace house in Märsta, 65Km north of Stockholm, in JO99wo (28eg). We met in 1992 and married October 1993 in Bahrain, United Arab Emirates. Christianity is illegal in Saudi so we had to travel to find a church. We found St. Christophers cathedral, Manama, Bahrain.
These photos were taken in the grounds of the hotel, during the wedding reception. We are absolutely 100% devoted to each other and take great pride in pleasing each other whenever possible. This includes breakfast in bed for Maj-Lis, every weekend, after nearly three decades of marriage. Every Friday we celebrate with a nice bottle of wine and a fine meal fit for a king.
We hadthree cats, the eldest is Beethoven, so named because he was so calm and composed when we got him!
After Beethoven we adopted two more cats; Smulan (Swedish for "the morsel"), and Ginger. We got Ginger in 2003.
In 2014 we moved to Spain and all three cats passed away, but they all led happy lives for over 18 years each. Today we are back in Sweden and have two new additions to the family, Elsa and Iris. I will post some pictures of them soon.
Maj-Lis is Swedish and was a nurse, now retired. Her hobby is cooking, and she was educated in the 60s at Hasselbacken restaurant and hotelier school. Today it is just a posh restaurant, but if you ask any 1/2-decent restaurant for "Hasselback Potatoes" they should know this Swedish delight. Please, NO comments about Maj-Lis and the "Swedish chef".
Maj-Lis is quite traditional when it comes to both food and celebrations; pre-Christmas and Easter are times for lengthy preparations in the kitchen. Maj-Lis is fluent in English and she often finds my spelling occasional error: I rely on spelll-check programs, as does any professional writer :-)
I worked for Ericsson as a method engineer, project manager, multimedia producer and now "Senior Telecom Engineer" (= oldest in the place) for Europe's largest ICT center. My English voice and decades of radio installation experience were ideal for training videos. I can now speak Swedish rather well, and I can even communicate with Norwegians.
Although hamradio is my hobby I seem to have very little time for it these days. I once joined the Uppsala radio club where there were a fantastic bunch of guys, all having the same interest in common. But I stopped visiting them when we moved to Spain, but today it would be a lot of travelling.
I used to spend a lot of time in the garden cutting down trees and chopping them up so we can burn wood during the winter. We had about 60 trees and some of them were huge. I had no power tools for processing the wood, other than a chainsaw. My main tools werean axe, tree-stump and sledge-hammer. It certainly keeps one fit :-). Today we have central heating and the over 65-year old body seems to creek and groan with heavy activity. Better to stay at home and cuddle Maj-lis.
I met wireless in 1964 when I was caught sticking pins in cable Redifusion wireless cables. Soon after this I built my first radio transmitter which operated in the middle of the MW band. I wasn't actually caught with the MW transmitter, but a detector van did come to the house they searched for a transmitter. They didn't find one though. Perhaps they expected a box with "ILLEGAL TRANSMITTER" written on the side instead of a lonely 807 laying on it's side with its cathode grinding red-hot to the musical strains of Cilla Black (remember, this was a few years ago!!).
I then graduated to HF and assumed the callsign "EL84" on the "Echo Charlie" pirate radio band (6.5 - 6.7 MHz). I chose EL84 for my first callsign during my first ever contact. When the guy at the other end asked me for a callsign I desperately looked round the room for inspiration, then my eyes fell on my TX output valve (yes, the EL84 does work very well on the short wave bands). I became legal in the 70's as G8TGL, later to become G4VVJ and now SM0VPO. Well, that's about all I will admit to.
I hope that you have fun with my circuits. If you decide to build some of the transmitters, then please spare a thought for your neighbours; use open-wire feeders, and fix your antenna as close to their TV antenna possible! (only kidding).
73s de HARRY.