One of my earliest memories was coming down to breakfast in our house in Colchester at the age of four, and finding the radio had changed.

My father, an RSM in the army medical  corps, had presumably traded in the old set for one with a more wavebands, in preparation for a posting to Malaya, as it was known at the time.

Military families abroad were served by the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), which kept me in touch with the emerging pop music scene throughout my childhood.

I don’t know anything about the model or make of the radio; possessions tended to be transient in a military household, but it was certainly a valve set and made of wood – radios were furniture in those days – and its characteristic sound was a background to my housewife mother’s activities, while my younger brother and me, and later my sister, grew up in various countries, home and abroad.

That radio kindled a fascination in me for technology; whenever a tradesman arrived to fit a stair carpet or mend the washing machine, I was always on the scene asking questions.

Like many children of the era, I had a set of Lego. For me, though, the brick with the bulb in was my favourite. Later, with Meccano, I remember attempting to build a rotary telephone dial. Finally I managed to get a Radionic X30 electronic kit as a birthday present.

During a stop-off during a school geography trip, while my schoolmates were buying fizzy drinks at a WH Smiths shop, I stumbled upon a Practical Electronics magazine. I didn’t have any money on me at the time, but at the next opportunity I had, I bought a copy and spent many hours poring over the articles and advertisements, even though I had neither the money nor the experience to build most of the projects.

I was already on my third or fourth soldering iron when I started my BSc in Electronic Engineering at the University of Bath.

Four years later, I started full-time work at Pye Telecommunications in Cambridge, the company which had sponsored my sandwich course degree. My work placements had helped me choose the department:- Test Equipment Engineering. Here we could use our ingenuity to combine commercial test equipment with self-designed circuitry to provide test facilities for the company’s products. We would drill the metalwork, lay out our PCBs, solder the components and debug the circuits ourselves.

The degree of automation would be set by the product type; Base Stations would typically be one or two per customer, Mobiles and Portables for taxis and emergency services would be much higher. Later, radio pagers would be built in quantities of tens of thousands per week.

As the percentage of software in the test equipment grew to overtake the electronic elements, I was led to take a part-time modular qualification in Software Engineering. Because we were an engineering company which did some software, rather than a pure software company, and because I had already secured a new position in software development, I elected not to do a project and cashed in my modules for a PGDip, rather than an MSc.

These days I’m employed as an Embedded Software Engineer; mainly in C, although I have used C++ and even Pascal in the past. I also create a few C# applications for internal use, to allow our RS232 and TCP/IP controlled products to be exercised thoroughly. I occasionally get to switch on a soldering iron or an oscilloscope.

When free time allows, I still dabble with home projects, from PIC software to electronics, involving anything from valves to ICs. This site catalogues some of the more interesting examples.