NICKS STORY

As a young lad, one day I found myself reading an ‘I SPY’ book called ‘Build your own Radio’. At 14 years old this seemed like more fun than the first skate park in England (sited on Portland, my then home QTH) and less effort than riding to Weymouth on my Chopper bike to meet my school friends that weekend. So off I went in search of the necessary materials clutching my component list. I ended up at the local TV shop, Combens in Fortuneswell and was shown out the back to the workshop.

An extremely helpful man, Mr Watts gave me the components I needed and explained various construction techniques. Of course these were completely wasted on me at the time as a soldering iron in my mind at age 14 could only be some instrument of torture and the coil; well I believe I was just learning about them at school in Biology! (Later I was to know Mr Watts as Geoff, G8BCH, a licenced Radio Amateur).

Anyway, the seed was sewn and after much kind help and many hours my Radio burst into life with my electric guitar amplifier playing some small part. I was hooked; Geoff had given me the Knowledge and power to build, invent, design and fix. I built a power supply, then an aerial and the construction projects grew beyond belief. There was a short period of remission when an experiment with a dozen or so 22,000uF 600vdc capacitors were discharged into a coil for the purpose of projecting a 1" ball bearing out of a tube like a rocket by the sudden magnetic field.This investigation into the possibilities of fuel-less space travel went badly wrong when the