A Kosmos Elektronik Experimenter's Kit received to Christmas was the catalyst that kindled the passion for wireless radios in my young teens. Soon after, I started building and experimenting with electronics circuits found published in magazines. It was this passion that influenced my educational path leading to the successful completion of a Radio and Television Technician apprenticeship, which later was eclipsed by my graduation as Bachelor of Information Technology in 2003.

In 1979, a work colleague introduced me to his hobby, Amateur Radio. It shouldn't take long until I succeeded in passing the C-class exam at the OPD Duesseldorf and was allocated the callsign DG5JB. The following 6 month were spent in training for the morse code exam, which was consequently passed leading to the upgrade of my callsign to DL5JR. At that time, my activities included working meteor scatter, aurora, sporadic-E and tropo-scatter on the 2m band. It was in 1982, after immigrating to Australia, when I received my current callsign VK5ABN.

My particular areas of interest in Amateur Radio are digital communications, satellite communications, antenna design, software development and porting of Hamsoft applications to NetBSD. I've been involved in projects such as the NetBSD packages collection, HAMLIB - HAM radio control library, GNU Radio software development kit, TNT/TKISS hostmode terminal program and HFLINK. I also enjoy collecting, restoring and operating former military and commercial radio equipment.