[Radio Wrangler]

As a young kid, I asked for money at Christmas and at my birthday. I was saving up for a radio kit I'd seen in PE. The Laskeys Skyrover 6-band job. Despite living just across the town from the BBC's main northern MW transmitter site, I could only get a peep out of the thing. I tried and tried. It had to be me! So I read everything I could get my hands on for years. Saving continued and eventually yielded an AR88 which really did work. It took a long time to get my confidence back and to convince myself that it wasn't me.

Roll on several years, chuck in some rolled-up pieces of paper with big words on them, and I found myself with a job designing things. I built breadboards of my designs, then prototype PCBs. It all had to work. Failure wasn't an available option. Some things worked first time, a lot didn't. I had to learn how to debug problems, to diagnose and understand them, and to find ways to circumnavigate them. That's what the pay was for.

One thing I learned was that if things weren't making sense, I should look at it from another direction. Sometimes it took several directions. But somehow, I got there. My stuff was going to work. My stuff was going to work properly. I was not going to sink to the level of that kit. I suppose I'd quite like to find one nowadays and give it a serious looking over with a pair of much more experienced eyes. I'm not sure what I'd do if I ever met the guy responsible for it. I'd like to throttle him, but I suppose I've really got a lot to thank him for. How does that saying go? That which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. (I've never figured out zombie movies. Freshly raised form the dead, I can't see where the superhuman strength comes from. By my logic they ought to be feeling very poorly)