Finnish Knack

Congratulations Ari! Thanks for the nice e-mail.

Hi,

I just wanted to thank you for your inspirational and enjoyable
book "SolderSmoke -- Global adventures in Wireless Electronics".
I bought it from Amazon.com as an electronic eBook a few months
ago and started reading. After a few pages a lot of flashbacks
from my own youth came into my mind.

In the early 1980's when I was a teenager I got some local
electronics and ham-radio books into my hands through relatives
and the local library. They were very interesting and I got
my mind and time set into DX-listening, building electronic devices
etc., but the HAM-radio licence just seemed to be so difficult
to achieve that I sort of displaced the idea from my mind
for a long time.

After that I did my conscriptional military service in the
Finnish navy, passed a 5-month radio communications course
(including the part that I feared the most in the HAM-radio
exam too - the CW) and served as a radio and battle control
radar operator on-board local corvette Turunmaa in the
late 80's.

After that university studies, foreign job assignments and
establishing my own family extinguished a lot of these former
hobbies for quite some time but now for the past few years as
things have sort of stabilized, I started to think and do
something about them again. Inspired at least partly by your
book decided to try it out and started studying the material
for our local radio amateur license exams. The exams were held
a couple of weeks ago and my license arrived today in the mail.

73 de Ari OH2ECG

Our book: "SolderSmoke -- Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics"http://soldersmoke.com/book.htmOur coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http://www.cafepress.com/SolderSmokeOur Book Store: http://astore.amazon.com/contracross-20