Hello, I am Basu Bhattacharya (VU2NSB) and live in New Delhi, India. Let me take the opportunity to introduce myself and tell you how and when the bug bit me and made me get into amateur radio, and also acquaint you with some of the things I did in the past and what I do now.

I got my amateur radio license Grade-I (the highest license category at that time) in the year 1975 at the age of 18. Ever since then, I am totally hooked to amateur radio, especially HF radio which continues to fascinate to me to date due to its profound mysteries.

I am a keen home-brewer having designed and fabricated several generations of ham radio transceivers and peripheral equipment over the years. These include my first project which was an all-valve all band HF SSB transceiver. We did not have WARC bands in those days. Later, I made a solid-state transceiver, a linear amplifier (PA). During early 2000, I designed and made a microprocessor-controlled all band HF transceiver with zero-IF, quadrature I/Q demodulator, and a hardware-based SDR processor. Even now, although I mostly use a commercial HF and VHF/UHF transceiver for my regular ham radio operation, I also continue to frequently operate my home-brew rig. I have a plethora of test equipment in my shack including Oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzer, vector network analyzer, signal generators, etc but most of my radio peripheral equipment like SWR meters, antenna analyzers are all home-brew stuff.

I have always been an antenna buff. Over the years, with the professional skills at my disposal, I have been designing and developing a wide variety of transmission line systems and antennas for HF, VHF/UHF, and microwave bands. For decades, I have also been a keen student of radio wave propagation with special emphasis on HF ionospheric sky-wave propagation. I have developed my own HF propagation forecasting software with a few additional parametric variables which are only found in some rather expensive software meant for professional applications.

When I was an engineering student studying at Birla Institute of Science and Technology (BITS), Pilani, India from where I graduated with a degree in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering, I initiated the formation of an amateur radio club on the campus. As a keen student, I had many opportunities for interacting and working with several world-renowned professors and intellectuals in the field of electronics and telecom.

I also had the distinction of being mentored by legends like Dr. Katashi Nose (KH6IJ), Dr. John D. Krause (W8JK) and several others from whom I gained a wealth of knowledge. In 1975, I worked independently under the guidance of Dr. M.M. Mukherjee and DR. Shiela Hinchey to design, develop and deployed several projects at BITS, Pilani which included a tropospheric duct mode TV receiving station to receive TV broadcast transmission from New Delhi (Doordarshan, Delhi) over a distance of around 250 Km. I also set up an APT receiving station for receiving NOAA-8 weather satellite pictures and also deployed a satellite amateur radio ground station for working through OSCAR-6 satellite using a self-designed, auto-trackable (on signal acquisition), and steerable crossed-yagi stack. Later in life, I had a very nice, long-standing and fruitful interaction for several years with L. B. Cebik (W4RNL) from whom I learned a lot about antenna designing and modeling.

I took up my first professional assignment at Electronics Development Laboratory, New Delhi, India as an engineer in the research and development division in 1979. I quickly moved up the ladder and was appointed the chief R&D engineer in 1983.

In the year 1989, I decided to float my own company to manufacture a wide range of Electronic T&M Instruments for use in the technical education sector, the industry, the Indian armed forces, DRDO, and the Space Application Center (ISRO). Leveraging the experience and skills that I had developed over the years we soon launched a formidable range of T&M products in India, and also exported to various other countries under the World Bank modernization projects during that time. We also developed and marketed in India, the first-ever GSM/GPS based vehicle tracking and management systems for private vehicles and commercial fleets.

In the year 2002, I gradually exited from the manufacturing business by selling off assets and technical know-how. Since 2004, I now work as a technical and design consultant to various industrial entities, premier government organizations, etc. I have also been associated with HamSphere AB, Sweden, and its owner Mr. Kelly Lindman (SM7NHC/5B4AIT) for several years.

In 2013-2014, Kelly had been developing HamSphere 4.0 (an excellent virtual simulated amateur HF radio platform). That when I got to know him well and got involved in his development process. Although HamSphere 4.0 is entirely his brainchild and a fruit of his mammoth efforts, I did get several opportunities to contribute in the process of developing a few simulation model algorithms for the system like the Ground-wave propagation, HF long-path propagation, Solar-flux Index based SSN model, etc. At present, HamSphere 4.0 proudly boasts of around 150 different virtual HF antennas in its repository for use by operators. These include a variety of wire antenna, Yagis, Cubical Quads, collinear, Yagi stacks, and other antenna arrays. Over the years, I have designed almost all virtual NEC compliant antennas available on HamSphere 4.0 today.

Best regards,

Basu (VU2NSB)