a friend of mine recently got a 100w from them, no ce marks on it anywhere.

Flexx-Fm wrote:a friend of mine recently got a 100w from them, no ce marks on it anywhere.

How long delivery?
It used to take them two months from Spain!

Why would anyone buy a tx from paul/aareff the guys a scumbag, the transmitter design he stole from steve the real veronica fm, that design was then totally overhauled and redisgned by stephen with the improvemnts that went onto be the nrg pro3 hi-gain tx.

The only market he can expolit is the novice/newbie who's buying there first transmitter and not that clued up on what there getting, just looked on his site £617 for a 100watt tx thats an out of date design he ripped off, overpriced and rip off spring to mind.

From what i've been told the equipment is sent from the dominican republic, the guy was waiting months for his order he told me emailed them loads of times and he kept been told it will be sent next week, he thought he'd been ripped off and wouldn't get his order, it finally came the box was covered in dominican republic stamps, he was well pissed and said he'd never order from them again.

jax wrote:Why would anyone buy a tx from paul/aareff the guys a scumbag, the transmitter design he stole from steve the real veronica fm, that design was then totally overhauled and redisgned by stephen with the improvemnts that went onto be the nrg pro3 hi-gain tx.

The only market he can expolit is the novice/newbie who's buying there first transmitter and not that clued up on what there getting, just looked on his site £617 for a 100watt tx thats an out of date design he ripped off, overpriced and rip off spring to mind.

From what i've been told the equipment is sent from the dominican republic, the guy was waiting months for his order he told me emailed them loads of times and he kept been told it will be sent next week, he thought he'd been ripped off and wouldn't get his order, it finally came the box was covered in dominican republic stamps, he was well pissed and said he'd never order from them again.

I wonder if his "many happy customers" including the MOD had the same issues??!!

If the MOD bought any equipment off him it confirms there lack of judgement when buying gear, they have a good record in buying shit be it boots, clothes that are not upto the task with squaddies having to buy there own.

jax wrote:If the MOD bought any equipment off him it confirms there lack of judgement when buying gear, they have a good record in buying shit be it boots, clothes that are not upto the task with squaddies having to buy there own.

In the Military you go to work knowing that every piece of kit you've got is tendered by the lowest bidder..

Hasn't changed, Never Will... Makes me Sick..

Le Shark wrote:

jax wrote:If the MOD bought any equipment off him it confirms there lack of judgement when buying gear, they have a good record in buying shit be it boots, clothes that are not upto the task with squaddies having to buy there own.

In the Military you go to work knowing that every piece of kit you've got is tendered by the lowest bidder..

Hasn't changed, Never Will... Makes me Sick..

Do his rigs match the squaddies on tour: always at extreme risk of blowing the fuck up?!!

Yep!

Is the Aareff Veronica PLL 9 no good then?

They have moved, the uk phone number is diverted to them, Paul and Steve where good mates back in the day as they both worked together for the BBC, They Veronica design was joint effort by both of them, Then they split to make there own versions when paul had newer ideas to make it better but steve didnt want to make any changed to the design, Steve continued to build the old design right upto the day he died but paul impoved it to where they are today. No one stole anything apart from from spanish and greeks making rebuilds of the same schematic.

Harmonics wrote:Is the Aareff Veronica PLL 9 no good then?

If you like them and your happy then with there size and slow locking time then yeah there ok Audio was always superb. cant say much else as I've not used one for a long time. RIP STEVE...

RigDoctor wrote:They have moved, the uk phone number is diverted to them, Paul and Steve where good mates back in the day as they both worked together for the BBC, They Veronica design was joint effort by both of them, Then they split to make there own versions when paul had newer ideas to make it better but steve didnt want to make any changed to the design, Steve continued to build the old design right upto the day he died but paul impoved it to where they are today. No one stole anything apart from from spanish and greeks making rebuilds of the same schematic.

I'm afraid you've been misinformed:

Paul never worked for the BBC. He actually never had a real full-time job at all. He was a DJ in clubs and pubs in Yorkshire. He never had any electronic knowledge at all - anything he learned was entirely from Stephen.

Back in the early 80s, Stephen came across the idea of the "Kallitron" oscillator, originally designed for valves in the 1930s by the Frenchman Cheirix. He redesigned it to work with transistors and found that it was remarkably stable. In fact, in the days before digitally tuned receivers, it was much more stable than the receivers of the day, so was stable enough to put on the air without a PLL.

Stephen ran "Veronica", a pirate station at weekends from the top of some of the highest hills around Bradford. Because of the high sites, high power and well-matched aerials, the pre-recorded programmes were heard as far south as Leicester and as far north as Newcastle. Stephen knew Paul - he lived in the same neighbourhood - and offered him a programme on the station.

They started selling rigs to other stations. Stephen would do the electronic construction, Paul would drill out the boxes, and Paul would make the deliveries and collect the money. This suited Stephen as he wanted to try to keep his identity secret from the DTI. It must be emphasised that all the actual electronics were done by Stephen (who had a formal electronic education).

In the early 90s, they decided to start selling kits. They engaged a company in Bradford to etch PCBs for them, and Stephen developed the first PLL circuit, using 74LS TTL chips. They added more equipment to their range, including a stereo coder, a limiter and some small PAs.

In the late 90s, Paul became ever more interested in his DJ "career", and his permanent late nights meant that he couldn't ever find the time to do anything for "Veronica" Stephen suggested that if he wasn't going to do any work, he shouldn't be paid - not an unrealistic demand - and there was a massive argument that included Lisa (Paul's girlfriend) and Christine (Stephen's girlfriend). It became very acrimonious, and ended with the split - Stephen would become "Veronica Kits", then changed that to "NRG Kits". Paul tried to sue for the use of the name! Stephen said that "he's welcome to it" because the reputation had been seriously damaged by then.

Paul set up another company in competition with Stephen. He used the old designs (including the stereo coder that couldn't decide left from right) and a PLL. He continued to make the old 2N6084 PA that was horribly inefficient, but was the only option in the mid- 80s when it was designed (by Stephen). Stephen moved to using BLW60 transistors and FETs for big output stages. Paul couldn't make anything bigger than 30 Watts.

Stephen and I redesigned the PLL PRO into the PLL PRO III. The phase comparator was the same (because it worked so well), but we added Out-Of-Lock Power-down, a broadband amplifier system that gave well over 4 Watts of very clean RF anywhere in the Band without any tuning, and a 74 HCT4059 to get rid of three of the divider ICs in the PLL circuit and allow the use of BCD frequency selection. The carefully balanced Kallitron oscillator was retained. The performance of the board was remarkable.

I redesigned the stereo coder, so that it was possible to label the input sockets "left" and "right" because it would always start up correctly (unlike the old one that Paul continued to supply). I also added mono / stereo switching and indication.

Paul lost a lot of business. He couldn't compete with the 4 Watt version. "His" effort limped to 1 Watt and needed output stage tweaking to get there. Paul didn't have OLPD, and needed a very well smoothed PSU to prevent hum.... It also produced a lot of spurs.

Stephen's "NRG" design was modified for a 1 Watt and a 300 mW version (the little one was for the New Zealand market where 300 mW can be used licence-free). I spent a lot of time improving the highpass filter at the output of the oscillator (to prevent any half-frequency getting into the output stages). It was carefully designed with a Spectrum Analyser and a Network Analyser. Paul never owned (or would ever have been capable of using) either of those instruments. The performance of the NRG board was better then than anything else on the market - cleaner RF output, lower carrier noise, superb supply ripple rejection and a genuine 4 Watts right across the band.

Stephen expanded the range, with a stereo version of the limiter, a limiter / coder combination board, various PAs (always supplied as ready-built modules) and Link equipment.

In 2001, with great fanfare, Paul released "his" "no-tune" 1 Watt board. He still used the three divider ICs in the PLL, and had tried to "simplify" the oscillator. He didn't understand the operation of the oscillator (and nor did his "engineer") and managed to make it massively imbalanced, so that the board would provide more output on half-frequency than where it was wanted! He had made the output stages "no tune" by over-driving the final into saturation so that it gave the same power out wherever the thing was tuned to - unfortunately, most of the output energy was spurs and harmonics. There was even huge amounts of in-band noise because of the saturated final transistor. It was utterly incompetent.

Paul paid a lot of money to advertise in the electronics comics, but Stephen was selling about four times as much equipment. - even without advertising - because of the excellent NRG reputation and highest quality products. Paul tried to sue Stephen again (I was closely involved with the case and provided expert testimony against Paul) and again he lost - at huge expense.

Stephen and I spent a lot of time designing new products. I gave him the PRO IV stereo coder design, and we prototyped them and found the design to be significantly better than anything else on the market. It used oversampling for the audio for very low distortion and digital sinewave synthesis for the pilot, so the phase accuracy of the multiplex components is perfect.

Stephen and I were designing the next generation of the exciter when he had a first stroke. For the first time we were using an off-the-shelf PLL IC (Stephen always wanted spares to be available anywhere in the world, so resisted using dedicated ICs).

We went this way for three reasons - the PLL ICs were getting really cheap and easily available, the 74LSTTL ICs were getting scarce, and we could save a huge amount of PCB space, making the PLL board much smaller. The transmitter strip remained much the same, but the PLL circuit just became a narrow strip along one side of the board (with a screen above and below the board to keep the digits out of the audio and RF). We decided to have facility on the PCB for either a fixed-frequency 8-pin PIC or a frequency-agile 18-pin PIC. The fixed-frequency version would be preferred for the RSL market.

There was also a 10 Watt version of the PLL board, and was entirely "no-tune", using a pair of 2SC1971s for the output. There was also a 25 Watt board, but we decided that this probably wouldn't be economical. A few prototypes were built.

Unfortunately, Stephen became more ill, and Christine (and their other staff) kept the business running. Stephen died, and NRG continued for a while. Christine then sold out the parts inventory to Kanga Kits.

It must be remembered - Paul had no electronic knowledge whatsoever, and was just a lying fantasist. Please consider - I saw his (and Lisa's) performances in court! He stole quite a lot of money from Stephen over the years, and then tried to set up his own business and sue NRG out of existence. He even tried to get Stephen's PCB manufacturer to stop making boards for NRG! He is a thoroughly disreputable and unpleasant character, and should be avoided at all costs....

Wow thats a lot of info, I only know what paul and steven told me, I would spend hours on the phone to steve talking about all sorts of things from radio to what ever. I talked with paul about 2 weeks ago and he's employed alot of new staff now, Some hardly talk a word of english, anyways, Steven told me he work as an engineer for the BBC. I can only conclude to him being a lyier then. Seems a shame as I liked steve.

-edit

Was it the drink that finished him off in the end. I remember calling him a few times and he sounded blind drunk every time. Maybe his illness led him to it.

Also I always thought paul talked shite, he told me to that he worked for the BBC, But reading what your've put it just makes be believe even more that hes a no good bull shitter.

Stephen did work for the BBC in the 80s, and supplied equipment to them later on from NRG, so no lying there! However, Paul never did....

If Stephen sounded drunk, it was the effects of the strokes. He didn't drink a huge amount (we went to the pub loads of times together, and I'd usually drink more than him!).

There were three things that contributed to his strokes - heavy smoking, the massive stress of the court cases and a congenital illness passed down from his Mother's side of the family. When the illness hit him, he went downhill very quickly. It was very sad. I visited him several times in hospital in Bradford, and each time he looked worse than the last....