brings it all back!

Somehow my first reply got lost, so I try again:

Your posting inspired me to dig through my old cards and pick two to continue the topic. The first one is also the first qsl I ever received for my first ever qso. I know the date is hard to decipher, but it reads 21/05/86:



The second one (front and back) confirmed one of my early cw dx qsos with JA on 15 mtrs. I was quite proud of that at the time, it was in spring of 1989:



I would gladly have done my few of years of cb before that, only it was totally illegal for us at the time...

martinedwards wrote: »

yup, totally illegal here too!

Well, I guess it was not so much the "you pay a fine" type of illegal, but rather the "you go to jail for a really long time" kind. Or in the case of a minor most likely "we won't let you finish any kind of meaningful education and you will do a ****ty job for the rest of your life". That kind of illegal.
Anyway, I eventually made my cb experience, but only years later.
What I still like about radio is that you can drop out of it for years or decades (as many hams do at one stage or another) and then you return and the thrill will be back immediately. I had not been qrv for about 7 years until my return to the hobby last summer and I still love it. Only my cw skills need a bit of refreshing

martinedwards wrote: »

I played CB in the 80s then passed my ham exam and never got round to getting a licence. 28 years later I finally got round to it and have been on air now for 16 months.

The system we had there and then was completely different from what it is now. It was relatively easy to get on the air with a training callsign at a club station (before passing the exam, but only with a licensed instructor in the room, a bit like the provisional drivers license nowadays), but at the same time it was a lot more difficult (to near impossible) to actually get permission to operate your own station. The call I used on the cards pictured above was the training callsign of the club station I was a member of at the time, so it was not my personal call. Club stations were quite common, most bigger companies and many of the so called "Pionierhäuser" (pl. of "Pionierhaus", a youth education centre running independently from the school system) had one.
And the club stations were badly needed, because virtually nobody had a station at home or was allowed to have one apart from the club station manager. So even after passing you exam your licence only permitted the use of a "managed" station where you didn't have any exclusive usage rights and most of the time you would not be alone at the station. But then again most club stations were quite well equipped (paid for by the state or operating company) and their use was virtually free for the hams using them. "Ham spirit" was a real thing, practically all ham related activities were and needed to be group activities.

Although I had already been quite active in the second half of the eighties on all HF bands and in phone as well as cw it took about another ten years from then until the spring of 1999 to get my first personal call. In the early nineties I didn't do any ham radio at all. Then in 2006 I stopped again, but I kept my German call active until last year which was associated with a significant yearly fee. I couldn't use it in Ireland, though. Since it was the easiest way to become active again (and to end the fee thing) I finally did another exam and got my Irish call last summer, after which I surrendered the German call sign and got on the air again. Quite a journey looking back from today and although it didn't take 28 years for me I can clearly see where you are coming from

martinedwards wrote: »

loving every minute (apart from the wind bringing down antennae of course!)

Exactly. Only I didn't lose any antenna so far, although I am on my fourth or fifth version. Currently it's a delta loop with a circumference of 10m made of 20m wire wound twice around the delta, like you would do with a quad. Looks quite exotic and works, although I think I will keep experimenting
Yesterday I bought a bike maintenance workstand in Lidl, which is basically a massive tripod able to carry 30kg at up to 2 metres height. This should make a nice mast base for portable activities next spring...