Who Am I

I'm Bert Audenaert, licensed radio amateur ON4DMD. I live with my partner and our three kids in a cohousing community just north of Ghent, Belgium (locator JO11VB) — my home base for everything you'll read about on this blog.

Amateur radio is only one part of a broader fascination with technology. Alongside it, I've been diving into Linux — running Arch on my own systems, mostly because I like understanding what's actually happening under the hood rather than just clicking through a GUI.

And somewhere in the little spare time that's left, I try to keep some sport in the mix too — nothing extreme, just enough to stay reasonably fit between work, family, and all the projects on the bench.

My story

I must have been about six years old when I spent every last cent of my pocket money on a radio at the local Tandy store. I had been going on about it for weeks — my mother's ears must have been ringing — but finally the day came and I got my radio.

By that same afternoon, it had stopped working. I had, of course, already taken it apart to see what was inside. Back to Tandy we went, my mother and I, and the salesman simply repaired it right there on the counter, in front of us. I sometimes wonder if that would even happen today. But the damage — in the best possible sense — was done. A seed had been planted. I wanted to know how radio actually worked.

For the rest of my childhood, I kept tinkering with electronics and radio. I was a subscriber to Elektor magazine and tried to build the projects inside it. One of my early successes was a crystal receiver — a tuned circuit, a germanium diode, and a pair of high-impedance headphones. I strung wire all over the garden as an antenna and listened for hours, day and night. Later I picked up an old army receiver with vacuum tubes, bought cheaply from an American army surplus store.

Cycling around the village where I grew up, I noticed a few houses with tall masts and antennas. At around fourteen, I finally worked up the courage to ring the doorbell at one of them. The man who answered wasn't a radio amateur himself — he'd simply bought the house from one — but he knew enough to point me toward a radio club in Zevergem (near Ghent - Belgium), just a few kilometers from where I lived. I went, and followed the amateur radio course there given by ON4ZG (SK).

At seventeen, I passed the exam and got my first call sign, ON1DMD. I bought a VHF/UHF handheld radio (Kenwood TH-79) and tried my luck on the repeaters, but the activity level left me disappointed. So I decided I needed to learn Morse — in those days, you needed CW to get access to the HF bands.

Meanwhile, I had a great time at the club. As the "young guy," I was taken along by the older OMs to all sorts of activities: Contests and field days, ham fairs, fox hunts, and more. I kept myself busy building my own antennas and small electronics projects — a power supply here, an LF circuit there.

Then came my studies — and an interest in the YLs ;-) — and the hobby was put on the back burner for a while.

By the time I finished my studies, the CW requirement had been dropped, and I got my current call sign, ON4DMD. In that period, I was mostly into U/V satellite communication and SSTV from the ISS. I also did some homebrew work on HF. I was never much of a QSO chaser, though — I was living in a small studio in the city, with plenty of QRM and no room for antennas.

Then came the kids, and my attention shifted to them. I kept following the hobby from a distance — reading, staying curious — but I wasn't active anymore.

Now that the kids are a bit older, I've finally decided it's time to learn CW properly and focus on QRP. This blog is about my first steps in rediscovering this beautiful hobby.

73, Bert — ON4DMD