Kostverlorenvaart

A friend asks me `can you explain what you're doing with these radios and why you do it?' So here goes. Quality Part of the fascination, for me, is the extreme quality of these huge devices. How they were built to be at the very cutting edge of technology in their time without any regard to what it would cost. Every country's army needed a stack of receivers to listen to any signal they could possibly pick up from friends and foes and the receiver needed to be as stable as possible, so one would be listening to the same exact frequency and not worry that the room full of radios had been quietly drifting into different channels. "When you open them up," Egon, the radio techniscian who restored my receivers, explains to me, "you see the craftsmanship of the individual who hand built that radio. Every resistor and capacitor soldered, bridging the contact points, in a certain way that everyone does a little differently. To me," Egon says, "this ca...

Fully washed Panama Boquete SHG (EP) with Pacamara, Catuai and Tipica from a single estate called Lerida in the region Chiriqui, Alto Quiel in Los Naranjos at the foot of the Baru volcano. Thanks Roman for the cup!!

Above is the Artisan roast profile of the first batch of Colombian Geisha that I roasted. At 8% moisture the bean is a little on the dry side of the spectrum so one must watch & listen carefully for the onset of FC. As a starting point I used a recent profile of delicious Ethiopian beans that were also relatively dry. I pre-heated the drum to 210ºC, started the roast and let Artisan cruise along the changes in airflow / element energy that I programmed into the "Alarms", gradually increasing airflow after 2:30 and decreasing element energy well before FC and again halfway the development. FC arrived a little later than I expected but from FC onwards I kept the development phase to 2:36min just as with the last of the Ethiopian batches that I roasted. I usually aim for a roast color of Tonino #95 -- anything within a margin of +/- 5 of that always turns out nice. (Some exceptions -- like a Colombian bean that I roast these days always tastes lighter than ...

(Acquired from Albert Sloot in Vroomshoop, NL) Listening to a EK07-D shortwave radio made by Rohde and Schwarz. Back then the price was around 12.000 DM. Today very few people need a 65kg shortwave radio so it's mainly the willingness to carry one inside (and the patience to find one) that gets one. Listening to short radio waves can be very educational. 1957 Rohde & Schwarz EK07 D Youtube version: https://youtu.be/zWnBAWkKvQw From Fred Osterman 's catalog " Shortwave Receivers Past & Present 4th Edition Communications Receivers 1942--2013 ": Lothar Rohde and Hermann Schwarz met in 1929 as college physics students at the Physical-Technical Institute in Jena, Germany. After graduation they built a precision frequency meter for wavelengths of 6 to 3600 meters and published an article on it in Hochfrequenztechnik und Elektroakustik in 1932. In 1933 they moved to Munich and established the Physikalisch-Technisches Entwicklungslabor Dr. Rohde ...

See also: https://kostverlorenvaart.blogspot.com/2019/09/tijes-cabinet-for-radio-holland-rca.html This receiver belonged to a man living on Overtoom, near my home here in Amsterdam NL and after he passed away, his widow and daughter cleared out his radio shack in the attic.      For a symbolic sum, a family living on the nearby Overtoom street here in Amsterdam gave me one of the radios that the man of the house, now deceased, had enjoyed listening to so much in his radio space on the top floor of the old house. There is much information about the history of the RCA AR-88 on the Radio Boulevard Western Historic Radio Museum page . The one I got was produced in 1946. A technical manual that came with the receiver, an RCA AR-88 branded as Radio Holland, suggests that the receiver has spent a number of years at sea on the Koningin Emma :  Koningin Emma, source of photo: https://www.psdnet.nl/foto-koningin-emma/ A few pictures of the inside on th...

ATC Espresso Youtube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS0hlrxwNGU

Kurzwellen, Kartoffeln, Geschichte Youtube version: https://youtu.be/Huny3jMXkR4

Miroslav Zikmund 100th birthday Youtube version:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAX9u-orZbo Jiri, OK2RZ is active as OL100ZH, 8 February to 28 February 2019, Celebrating  Miroslav Zikmund’s  100th birthday. Miroslav Zikmund (born 14 February 1919) and  Jiří Hanzelka (24 December 1920 – 15 February 2003),  known as Zikmund and Hanzelka, met at the Prague university and became close friends, planning their world travels. They managed to actually go for their dream, driving a superb silver car, the Czech Tatra 87 and they published stories about their experiences, with photography, film and radio reporting. Selling millions of books, they were what today we would call bloggers / influencers with a huge audience who could experience what it's like to go to faraway places, to roam the earth and be self made heroes of their time. At the end of their first trip they returned home to a country that had fallen under Soviet oppression. Considered...