The High School Years
Looking back at my life so far, my happiest times were during my high school years in the 1980's. My marks while attending Hillcrest High School in Ottawa were quite good, I had some very good friends, and some interesting, albeit eccentric hobbies. Building and testing home-made explosives, jamming local FM radio stations using home-made transmitters, and running a part-time pirate radio station on the broadcast FM band here in Ottawa were just a few things we did. I am a die-hard retro '80's music fan, likely due to my memories being so sweet during that time of my life.
Me as a teenager in high school. As a member of the camera club,
I had access to FREE black & white 35mm film.
Voices in the Dark
By the age of fifteen I was missing Toronto a lot. I wanted to listen to
the local radio stations in order to hear the familiar voices I had grown up
listening to. The internet had not yet been invented, so the only solution
was to get a good radio, build a large antenna, and try to pull in the radio stations
from Toronto.. I soon found out that I could
get a few AM stations only at night when the signals would skip
off the ionosphere and bounce back to earth hundreds of kilometers away.
This was my first introduction to what amateur radio operators refer to as "DX-ing".
I got more than I had expected; not only did I get local broadcast AM stations from Toronto, but I got stations where the announcers had different English accents than what I was used to. The traffic reports would refer to roads that I had never heard of. I would spend hours listening through the static, hoping to hear something that could allow me to pinpoint the city in which the station was located. Eventually I was able to confirm having listened to Boston, 600km south of Ottawa, New York City, 800km to the south, and even Chicago, which is 1200km to the west!
Throughout my high-school years, many nights I spent my first few hours in bed with a Sony Walkman and headphones, tuning in and listening to these stations. The weak signals fading in and out of the static made it quite a challenge to understand the voices, but knowing that they were coming through the night from such far away cities kept me listening. One day I would like to travel to these cities and see them for myself.
Radio waves at certain frequencies will skip off the ionosphere
and back to earth. Image copyright NASA.
Buying a Car at Age Seventeen, and Road Trips to the USA
I managed to save a bit of money from my part-time job to buy an old 1978
Honda Civic which was in quite bad shape, but at least it ran. Suddenly, I
was able to travel and explore areas that I could not have reached by bicycle.
The first road trip was to Montreal with my best friend Michel. In the
ensuing years as I slowly REBUILT that old car, we strayed further and further
away from home. Eventually we made several trips to Toronto, New York
City, and to the state of South Carolina in USA. The final and longest
road trip took place in 1988 when we drove some 4000km from Ottawa to New Orleans, Louisiana
in USA, and then back to Ottawa.
LEFT: My first car, 1978 Honda Civic. Note my
car body-work-in-progress. RIGHT: Road trip from Ottawa to New Orleans with my
1965 V.W. Bus
The University Years
I have not mentioned this yet, but since about the age of ten I had a strong fascination with electronics. By the age of twelve I was tinkering with projects plugged directly into the local 120 Volt power household power mains - something most parents today would not let their children near. As a result of this freedom, my curiosity about electricity and electronics grew to such a level that I decided to make a career out of it. In 1994, I graduated Carleton University in Ottawa with a Bachelor's Degree in Electronics Engineering.
Graduation day with my electronics engineering degree.
From left to right: My
father, step-mother, mother, myself, my girlfriend at that time,Kathleen,
and
my best friend to this day, Michel, who is now a lawyer with his own law firm..
