Biography

If you have ended up here whilst looking for G8LZI/2, there is another QRZCQ page for that callsign which explains my usage of the /2 …

Thank you for looking me up. I go by the name of “CHRIS” …

My interest in radio started some time in the 1960’s when I was growing up in South London. However, for the past 40 years or so, I have been living out in the flatlands of East Anglia on the Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire borders. The present QTH is a village in South West Norfolk, called Feltwell- its located on the edge of the Fens, about 22 miles (~35km) North East of Cambridge.

The callsign, G8LZI, was issued to me in 1976. Prior to that I was one of the operators of c/s 20̷A (formerly 37C) making use of the ubiquitous WS19 HP for its transmitting abilities and the most excellent Eddystone 730/4 receiver. (If you’re on social media and interested to see a photograph of that particular station, I have shared one on my FB page) After getting my Ham callsign, I was active on the air for only a couple of years, then went back to being a listener...

FAST FORWARD (work and raising children - not active as a Radio Ham)

Although I now have all the time that retirement affords, I still don’t do a lot more than listen. Ever since the removal of the manual spotting facility of Hamspots.net , it seems to me that I am in a daily struggle to successfully upload my spots via pskreporter :o(

I hardly ever switch on the ham band transmitting equipment, but if I do, it’ll probably be in order to have a quick Olivia QSO - I’m not interested in using voice modes, or for that matter, any mode (including Olivia variants) that send faster than my brain is capable of working! Max kudos to Pawel Jalocha, SP9VRC, inventor of Olivia!

When I’m in the shack, I usually have a receiver tuned to the ham bands, and am likely to be looking out for Olivia signals. My modus operandi is to simply place a microphone into one of the receiver’s headphone cups and decode what it hears on a 20 year old laptop. The sound card is calibrated, and more often than not, this arrangement returns a better quality decode than when using the rigs’ internal sound cards. If I find myself in QSO, I utilise a further 2 decoders (one of which is set to a super-long integration period) so if there are errors, 3 decodes allow me to employ majority voting.

Other modes? I confess to having a bit of a soft spot for hell, wspr and ROS ;0)

Thanks for taking the time to read this … chris