About me Married to Sheri, a loving wife who tolerates the sometime hairbrained and demented wanderings of a White haired man that seems more focussed on wires than a 2m high at the shoulder high kicking agressive Momma moose bolting from a similarly sized hungry bear. Ever been chased by a moose whilst riding a sit on lawn mower? They need a few more gears in my view... Ive been employed versus worked now for the past 25 years for an Integrated Oil and Gas Company, based in Houston Texas and the European/Africa, Americas and now Asia Pacific theatres. Born in Redhill Surrey and living for the first 20 years of so on the Clockhouse Estate Coulsdon UK, my formative years revolved exploring the woods on my bike, cycling up and down old WWII V1 bomb craters, or endless walking up and down the Hill and into Croydon some miles away to go swimming saving my bus money for a sweetie or two on the way back. Saturday mornings were a favorite attending the kids "ABC Minors" show in the ABC Cinema in Purley. This has long gone. We lived in the "green belt" just on the outskirts of South (sarf) London and within eyesight of what we call suburbia,very much surrounded by fields the occasional pig farm; On a good non smoggy day looking down from the lofty North Downs into the London basin, St Pauls Cathedral was just visible glinting on the rare sunlit skyline. I fear that view has gone now with the advent of more and more buildings in the City. Weekends from Age 7 onwards were spent caddying on the nearby Woodcote Club Golfcourse for two bob, or even 2/6d a round (on a good day),or alternatively, in season, lobbing small hard crab apples skewered onto the ends of long Green sticks and thrown missle like at passing golfers. This whilst secreted pseudo cat like 50 foot up a swaying tree. My interest in Physics, or moreover as a Geographer started with meteorology and particularly for some reason a fascination with the white stuff that used to fall from the sky. Thoughts of walking to school across local field and the Golf Course during the Cold bitter winter of 1962/63 still come to mind, sinking up to the top of my legs in deep snow drifts and wet clumpy sticky stuff seeping down inside my Black Wellington boots. Cold blotchy Red and White legs and wet feet were the order of the day. Man that was a long cold winter. Education continued thru school and college and lasted many a year, but I never considered myself a true academic and still dont - my poor teachers at Woodcote Secondary School and Purley High School for Boys echoed this more than once. Perhaps I could be classified as a very late developer. I liked sports at school and was a pretty fierce sprinter up to the 400m mark, then poor thereafter, and over a year or two gained my schools "colors" in Basketball and Soccer. Its about this time I first was introduced to radio. I was very fortunate to have a excellent and long suffering mentor in my Uncle Bill Jones G4LNL,from Betchworth Surrey. It was he who gave me my first true professional shortwave receiver- a Hallicrafters SX28, and also gave me my first introduction to the affects meteors entering the earths atmosphere have on radio signals, for a few seconds causing a far off radio signal to be reflected off the fleeting ionized trail as it burnt up high in the atmosphere. It was he that nutured the spark of "why?" questioning and curiosity in my brain - Secondly, my good friend Neil Marshall G8JAZ and some other members of the Purley and District radio club,and in particular the late Ted Honeywood G3GKF, who pushed and challenged me hard into this intriguing and diverse radio field, which from being "just" a hobby has become a lot more than "just" a job. An apprenticeship followed, then an 11 year spell with the GPO Nee British Telecomm in Croydon and Scotland working on everything from repairing Mrs Smith telephone cord chewed by dear "Dinky", climbing up and down telephone poles to shutting down high powered transmitters used by taxi firms in South London. More diverse and technically challenging worked continued in my later career with BT International including installing and operating MegaWatt Troposcatter transmitters serving the North Sea Oil industry and singing to my self on early experimental VSAT terminals via OTS or some other satellite. In 1978 I decided that I needed a break from BT, and particuraly the repetetive "Dinkies" were becoming tiresome, so I elected to try get unpaid leave for 3 years as an educational and development post, and with the assistance from the Post Office Engineering Union I was released after securing a radio operator/mechanics position in Antarctica, mostly gained on my short experiences as a radio ham and in particular my love of morse code. Morse code was still in use up to the mid 80's, plus I seemed to have a perchant of breaking and subsequently (sometimes) repairing of most things. On the way to Antarctic we were marooned on the Falkland Islands after our Antarctic bound ship broke one engine whilst going up the river Plate, and couldnt therefore venture into ice strewn waters. We stayed part of the time in Port Stanley eating Mutton or MRE's but found employment in the "camp" working on a farm near Goose Green rising up at 5am collecting the breakfast from the married quarters and the first nip of Navy Neaters Black Rum and rubber fish tasting penguin eggs. Work consisted of lamb marking some 4000 a day with the support of very tolerant Chilean Gauchos. My job mostly consisted of penning and lobbing tails off lambs or worse placing painful rubber rings over the private parts of the poor males. It wasnt all work and myself and Geoff Somers spent some time yomping and bivvying across East Falkand some years before the British Marines did the same in rather more dangerous circumstances doing another worthwhile job. When back in Stanley we took up the invitation from the Marines to go on a short deployment and sailed around East Falkland into what was a fierce storm. We ran into more protective waters behind a couple of small islands but the rolling of the ship made for a very sick group of previously hardened sea-going individuals. Perhaps it was made worse by the smell and visual affects of the bobbing penguin eggs in huge bubbling pot of Curry that the chef had created. I can still smell and see it now. Friday Nights in Stanley were a favorite with a food and disco (by ticket) at the Moody Brook Barracks some way out of town. We managed to cadge a lift from a landrover to and from town and savored the latest music from weekly BFPO tapes sent from the UK, and marvel on how much alchol can be consumed by such a small number of squaddies. I joined a few Marine patrols at and near the airport - effectively there were two. One was the hard top where daily flights from Argentina and Chile landed, and another was a short metal interlocked panel strip used by the landowners and farmers mostly flying around in small Cesnas. This metal strip was destroyed in the storm when we were out in that fierce storm above. The hard strip airport was protected by a lone marine, his FN rifle, some 20 rounds of ammo and a grotty uhf radio that really didnt work back to Moody Brook that well. The Marines took turns to man a small hut at the end of the runway. A pretty lonely job but augmented by a tour of the 'permimeter' that took in the beautiful golden sandy beaches and spotting the various wildlfe that took little notice of a lone squaddy and his rifle. It would be another 4 years before the Argentines invaded this lovely windswept unique sheep haven and made on my subsequenct return walking on these beaches a no-go area due to land-mines. I joined the Marine on a couple of recces and must load the photos sometime. Once in Antarctic I looked after seasonal ship and aircraft and field party Short Wave communications, and started my earliest days of radio propagation research at VHF and Lower Frequencies. It was the height of the sunspot cycle and my Uncle Bill and other other friends had managed to ship a valved/tubed black and white 405 line Television to my base. It was a magical day when I plugged up the TV to a small piece of wire and was astonished to receive BBC Television on 405 Lines from 16,000 Kms away and watched with some interference the launch of the Metro car, learned how to make Hot Cross buns watching BBC "Nationwide" and part of my favorite TV program "Tomorrows World". So for the next 33 months I was out of the UK and experienced two Antarctic winters and three summer science seasons without a break based on Adelaide Island. Apart from work I enjoyed hard physical exilharating expeditions with various trips around the Continent using 9 dog Husky teams and skidoos, with even scarier roped up trips across creaking cravasse fields and thin rubbery gray sea ice. Magical nighttime moonlit marathon doggying trips thru past frozen icebergs were truly memories of a liftime. I love and still love Antarctica which for all the hype of the big White Freezer of a Continent is to my mind the most colorful (at times) continent on this Earth. In my last year I met up with Lady Ginny and Sir Ran Fiennes and their support team located some 1500 miles from my base and was offered a role at the other end of the globe supporting comms for the Transglobe Expedition, the first circumnvaigation of the earth via both North and South Poles. After supporting the Transglobe expedition based at CFS Alert and at Tanquary Fjord, including close ties with the local Wolf population who seem to eye me as either a play thing or prey from my solo radio monitoring site. Ive never really have never figured out which yet. Back from the Arctic I returned briefly to Scotland and BT but my stay was short lived with the advent of war in the Falklands and the loss of of three co-workers from a British Antarctic base, so I returned South for another scary at times 6 months sojourn. Further unpaid leave for study and work in the Polar regions continued with the NERC/British Antarctic survey at one end, and with the Polar Continental Shelf Project up North at the other. For years on end I seemed to bounce from one end of the globe to the other on one polar expedition with Ran Fiennes or other friends Further cold finger and body numbing expeditions then followed providing base commander and communications lifeline services. These were aimed both at gaining data for various Earth science projects, such as looking at dissolved Oxygen isotopes by endless very cold hand drilling ice cores and retrieving them from 10 or 20m deeps holes on Floating Ice shelves. These ice shelves, which by the way, recent press are saying are no longer tethered, and are now floating away and breaking up. Other field sampling work included locating and indentifying ancient salt water sponges brought up to the surface by ice over Millenia. Note to self to wear protective gloves as these sponges gave me more pain than imagined from glass like filaments burrying into unprotected skin; Do not to be used in the bath! These expeditions were also as a means of raising funds for charities including Sir Ran Fiennes and Dr. Mike Stroud unsupported and hazardous to health "manhauling" sojourns collecting Millions in USD for the Multiple Sclerosis Society, and various Cancer research or Hospice groups. Other private Polar Expeditions both North and South Poles continued up into the middle 90's, based from a forward communications locale beit a canvas tent, cardboard hut, or ice box style frozen externally but warm interior of a Soviet military caboose proferred by the KGB. All very akin to "Ice station Zebra". If you seen the film Id say it as a true fascimile for a lot of what went on. Radio propagation research was also conducted on these trips both on Shortwave and VHF and at times whilst under the influence of Huge Solar storms that plagued us in some respects, but gave an opportunity to receive and send data from a high latitude far North Geomagnetic and within the Auroral oval locations. Expeditions tend to start at the end of the long Polar Winter often prior to the sun returning and with still air temperatures in the low -50C's, sometime dipping into the -60's. Cables flexible at -20C snap in small breezes at these temperatures These trips seemingly didnt diminsh the love of the White stuff and I, compared with some of my fellow travelers, still have all my fingers and toes. Just. From the mid 90's till now Ive been involved in supporting the activities of London based Raleigh International, a youth development group, where Ive been setting up and teaching radio communications and voice procedures to staff and the 17-25 yr old volunteers. These are 5 or 7 week expeditions, taking in an adventure, environmental and community project Assignments have included anything from the Forests of Siberia fighting off huge biting Horse Flies (fire transects); the Gobi desert (hiking) and its abrasive sand that gets into every (every) orifice, and into the radios too Ive also visited been witness to the beautiful magical scenery of Uganda,"the mountains of the Moon",friendly Oman where water rights are literally worth still killing over, right down to the Equatorial regions of Sabah/Borneo.Further South to Namibia and its remarkable sand dunes, seasonally flooded Salt pans and the wildlife in the Okavango Delta. Short wave radio is still used from project sites back to base camp, so everyone has to know one end of a dipole is up! Im an amateur radio enthusiast/radio ham and was licensed at 17 in the UK as G4DMA, subsequent Global deployments over the past 35 years and worldly homes have meant I have sported many ham, commercial ship, and now Experimental callsigns. As a side line Im also a qualified "radio officer" (a dying breed) and still able to bash out a message on a morse key if pushed, and have a "steering ticket" for vessels over 1500T, gaining this on a trip on the John Biscoe from Southampton via Montevideo/Falkand Islands/Antarctica back in 1978. We presently live in Singapore and pretty inactive on Shortwave, but have dabbled in Low Frequencies 137/500kHz reception as 9V 1 LF. From Nov 2008 I hope to be operational in our home in Alaska as KL1 X. I remember people saying "listening on LongWave from the Equator - youll never hear anything apart from static". Well- yup Ive heard a load of static but also received ham radio signals on 137kHz from Europe, Asia and even New Zealand. Ive recently been granted a USA FCC Part 5 experimental callsign WE2 XPQ. From 2003/2006 I previously was conducted propagation experiments on 137 kHz and active as WD2 XDW in the USA states of Alaska and Oklahoma. Other social activities include walking, ride X country bikes and X country seasonal season. I do down hill skiing very badly but Sheri has promised me more "edge".Ive been far far too sedenatary here. Laurence Howell Singapore Sept 10 2008. Expeditions Ive had a part in - and some book data British Antarctic Survey 1978/82 - Adelaide Island and Argentine Island group Transglobe Expedition 1979/82 - First Circumnavigation of the Earth via both Poles - sea/land/ice http://www.transglobe-expedition.org/page/biographies To The Ends of the Earth (1983) ISBN 0-340-25277-4, account of the Transglobe Expedition. Mind Over Matter: The Epic Crossing of the Antarctic Continent (1993) ISBN 0-385-31216-4 Exel North Pole Expedition 2000 Damart North Pole expedition - Sredniy USSR to North Pole 2000/2001 PUNS unsupported expeditions, North Pole 1986/1989 Pentland South Pole Expedition 2004 Dr. Steve Martin/David Mitchell, sucessful North Pole unsupported expedition 1997 M and G North Pole Expedition 2002 The 1998 report on the scientific work of the North and South Polar Expeditions report of Fiennes, Shepard, Howell and Stroud 1985-1993