Radio

To say that radio is merely one of my interests would be an understatement of sorts. It's been more of a passion and it goes back to the days when I was in Nigeria. My Dad was a regular listener to the BBC since that was the only reliable means of getting up-to-date news from home. Well, I continued listening to the BBC even after the news was over and discovered that there was a whole world of information coming through over the airwaves. In fact, I can safely say that I learnt more about the world around me in those years from listening to the BBC than from attending classes in school!  The only other stations I actually found worth listening to were Radio Netherlands, Radio Australia and sometimes, the Voice of America. But, the BBC was the Big Daddy of them all- available almost 24 hours a day and broadcasting a variety of programmes whose common denominator was listenability

It was from Radio Netherlands that I first learnt about QSL Cards. QSL comes from the Ham Operators lexicon (I incidentally also hold a Ham Radio licence though I have never had occasion to put it to use, just like my Driving Licence!) and stands for "Acknowledging Reception of Report."  Most  Ham Radio stations (and Ham Operators) broadcast short-wave and that had its pros and cons. The pros were that short-wave signals could theoretically bounce off the ionosphere any number of times and in this way circumnavigate the earth; the cons were that the effectiveness of the ionosphere to refract  these signals back to earth was dependent on events taking place on the sun's surface such as sunspot activity and solar storms. So, in other words, once these signals left a transmitter, there was no way for the broadcaster to know whether it had reached its intended audience. In the early days of broadcasting, the broadcaster was dependent on the listener to write in and say that he had indeed received the broadcast; in response, the broadcaster would send a postcard acknowledging "reception of report", the QSL Card.

Pretty soon, this became a hobby among short-wave listeners; their sole aim being to collect as many QSL card from as many parts of the world as possible. This was no easy task, since a radio signal was subject to many variables, from the sun's behaviour, as explained above, to the power at which it was transmitted to the the quality of the receiver used to the skill and experience of the listener, not to forget his willingness to stay up half the night to catch that eternally elusive signal from Radio Gambia! Once he'd caught that signal, he'd write out a 'reception report' which contained a set format and a set rating on the quality of the signal.

The listener  was also obliged to give a few excerpts from the program he'd been listening to so that the station could verify his report ie., make sure he wasn't conning, and send him a QSL Card.Well, that, in a nutshell, is what DXing is all about. And what is this new term, DXing, I hear you ask - this is what the hobby came to be called, with D presumably standing for Distance and X for unknown. Click here to view my QSL Card Collection. 

Computers

My early interest in radio could well have been in computers instead- when I gave my Dad a choice between buying me a computer and a radio, he chose  a radio with a computer inside it, or so the ad said! (It was a Sony ICF 7600D PLL synthesised receiver with digital tuning from 3 to 30 Megs, state of the art even today, 15 years on!). So, ultimately, the first time I set my eyes (and hands) on a computer was after I joined JNU.  The School of Computer and System Sciences had a mainframe computer which took up a whole room and had a whole lot of dumb terminals attached to it. Each user was rationed 1MB of memory, and since the only User Manual there was had dissappeared eons ago, the commands were either passed on through word of mouth or learnt through trial and error! My efforts to type my M.Phil dissertation on it was prematurely aborted since the mainframe took that moment to give up the ghost.

My next encounter with a computer was when my friend Kalyan returned from his Nehru fellowship sponsored trip to England and brought along a Digital Laptop computer. Then, my friend Rambo also bought a desktop and pretty soon, I was fiddling around with these computers more than these guys. Sez a lot about my friends that they lemmme do what I did! This even after Kalyan's laptop had a serious disk crash.(I swear I had nothing to do with that!)

The urge to learn more about these machines and what made them tick propelled me to take up a computer course- after looking at all the options, I decided to do a Certificate Course in Information Technology from the CMS Corporation. A few classes on software languages was sufficient to come to the conclusion that it was the most boring thing one could do with or without ones clothes on. I also realised that one could learn more from a hands-on approach than from going to any number of classes. So, since then, on my own, I've figured out how to handle the Internet, and in particular, I've been figuring out the intricacies of streaming audio over the Internet, thus combining my interest in Computers and Radio. Click here to see and hear what I have been upto.

Quizzing