Department of Electrical Engineering (ISY)

My personal page:

About me

Coming from Lidköping in the south-western part of Sweden, I have now settled down i Mantorp outside of Linköping in the south-eastern part living with two cats. I feel that mowing the lawn takes my entire leasure time. Owning a house does keep you on your toes and on your feet though.

I have always had a weak spot for taking all kinds of machinery apart, and later, sometimes even putting it together again. Since before I can remember I have been at electrical stuff (yes, I have had close encounters with both 220 and 310 volts --- but came out none the wiser). I never understood the label on the radios "No serviceable parts inside", all those radios turned out to be just crammed with serviceable parts!

After taking my M.S. degree in Physics and Electrical Engineering I worked for a couple of years with making mathematical models of physical systems and developing the control algorithms for the processes too. But since I always have been interesting in teaching I later found an occupation as Research Engineer at Linköping University where I could combine my interests in teaching and electronics. In the new millennium I went teaching undergraduates in "something with computers" --- as my mother puts it --- on a full time basis.

How it all started

It's in the genes. My dad is a ham radio operator and I still vividly remember an early Saturday morning at my grandmother's house, some 30 kilometres from Lidköping. I must have been 13 or 14 years old at the time. We had just had breakfast when I found my dad having a conversation over the radio with a fellow ham (SM6DOA) back in Lidköping. The other ham was tapping out morse code, and dad used SSB telephony. I didn't know morse code, except as visual dots and dashes I somehow had learnt, so I only understood this end of the communication. I pricked my ears when I heard dad saying, in kind of excited tone, to the other ham "Did you say the school is burned to the ground?". The answer came soon enough "di-da-da-dah di-dah". It took me a sec or two to translate the tones to visual dots and dashes, but the deciphering was unambiguous: "JA" (meaning "yes"). Wow! My school had been arsoned. And the next few terms we had to make do with makeshift barracks while the main building was restored. And I was to know through morse code! Until then, I hadn't really understood that morse code could be used to convey important information. But then I knew I just had to learn it... And so I did. It took a while, but at 15 I was a happy licensed kid with a brand new call: SM6JAB!

I had many QSO:s back then (late 70's) but couldn't combine the hobby with my coming studies. And so I had a lapse of almost 15 years until I was bitten by the bug again. I now run morse code happily up to about 30 WPM, but for casual conversations 23 WPM is more comfortable. The mic is very seldomly even connected to the rig these days. I have tried PSK31, which sounds like fun, but I'd rather go for any ol' morse code QSO. In fact, since computers are my living, I try to keep them mostly out of the shack. My log is manual, on paper. I don't trust hard disks enough!

"Fiddling" with electronics/radios is a fun as actually being on the bands so my QSO-rate is fairly low. I spend more time listening than actually sending. I also teach morse code at the local club, Linköpings Radioamatörer (sorry, in swedish only). We use the Koch method with success. See the panel on the left.

Have you actually read everything above to get here? Amazing! Well, click on a subject in the panel on the left for some particulars in the hobby!

And best of 73 to you, as we say in morse (meaning best wishes)

/Micke