Thats sounds very sad, and that he must of suffered lots from his strokes, Its nice to actually talk to someone who was close to him. As i have much respect for him and may he rest in peice.

Stephen was a kind and generous person, and was particularly helpful to me when I was going through a bad patch. Christine helped too.

Stephen stayed with us when he came down to London (if his sister wasn't in town), and I remember us sitting at the table in my Living Room all night with a couple of pads, pencils, calculators and data books... We did some good designs!

I thought Paul had secured a job at the beeb as well in 1990, i was at stephens when he called round and said he'd just driven back from london after a job interview, stephen asked how it had gone and he said he'd got it, he also said he'd taken a tx he'd built to show what he could do, so Paul must have been bullshiting about getting the job, probably got a rejection letter.

I still have the first pll transmitter stephen built, it gave 100milli watt out and was roughly the same size as the pro3, the pll was set with jumper wires, the oscilattor operated at quarter of the output frequency, you could only adjust the output freq +/- 3mhz without having to realign all the stages, i can also confirm Paul was in no way involved in the original deisgn.

Just remembered this, Paul was having girlfriend problems at the time, she'd left him shortly after having his baby and he thought she was seeing someone else so he'd asked stephen to build a small tracker transmitter so he could fit in the babies pram frame so he could tell if she was in the guys house with the baby, i think he also tried getting a court injunction against the guy she was seeing, he's always been arsehole.

I can assure you that the BBC would laugh at anything that Paul could have taken along as "his" work. They wouldn't be the slightest bit interested in home-made transmitters!

The most basic BBC-designed Band II exciter used over 30 transistors and 11 ICs and delivered (roughly) 300 mW. It incorporated deviation limiting and all sorts of additional facilities that we just wouldn't be interested in!

[img]whats being said in this forum is wrong about AAREFF paul is no scumbag HE HAS OVER HAULED THE transmitters and who by the way won the tech specification when it came down to the fcc and lices of eu standards ?? AAREFF THATS WHO. man its totaly a disgrace the way you are saying he robbed the design from steve the thing was steeve wouldnt change to meet world wide specifications he wanted to continue with the VCO not a pll lock system thats specified in the regulations..
look i could go on all day telling u the truth but i wont steeve moss was a great desighner and engineer in the days of past but thats all i will say for now [/img]

REGARDS G-1

TBQH I'd rather believe a level headed poster, like Albert H, than someone that has to rant.

G-RADIO1 here's something that you probably didn't know:

Back in the day when the only PLL rig you could get from Veronica was a 25MHz quadrupuled (two doubler stages) design, he also did the double transistor oscillator VFO design. I'd been playing with radio gear making my own PLL design and antennas.

One day I decided to call Stephen with some of the ideas I'd had - I'd already sent him some hand drawn diagrams that he used to laugh at (well I was only 17). One was to add a PLL to his VFO using the 50Mhz output from one side of the oscillator, another was to make some broadband (i.e. no-tune) amplifiers and an antenna made out of a CB base station antenna.

I was quietly satisfied when I saw my ideas implemented into a successful product and I never complained or asked for anything in return. Stephen never bothered with my 5/8 wave CB base antenna idea, but take a look at the 5/8 wave sold by AAREFF!! co-incidence?? I wonder where Mr. Hollings got that idea from.

Even Mr.Hollings own facebook page has no mention of a job at the BBC! Look for yourself (if you are on FB)

http://www.facebook.com/paul.hollings.1966

Something else RADIO - G1: It is wrong of you to make statements that can no longer be defended by the person in question, seeing that is he is sadly departed.

The link below is a statement written by stephen in 1999 regarding Paul hollings steeling his designs and company name veronica, veronica was establish by stephen the transmitters were designed also by stephen.https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgr ... 26ZH3TMsJM




As 3 mtr jim stated the pll transmitters stephen sold evolved from a vfo exciter that operated at quarter of the frequency with a pll that was programmed with wire jumpers, this then evolved into the 50meg version with virtually the same pll circuit with a few improvements such as dip switch frequency selection way before paul hollings got involved.

G radio1 your talking total shit, you have no idea what your talking about the equipment aareff are selling is a rip off Stephens early designs from the early 90's, stephen went onto improve the equipment he sold that out classed paul hollings poor offerings, paul carried on selling the desisgns he stole as he doesn't have the knowledge to update or improve the equipment.

The radio game is a relatively small community, any one with an ounce of technical knowledge knows Stephen the original veronica fm designed, built and sold pll fm transmitting equipment under the name veronica fm years before paul hollings weedoled his way in, at that time paul hollings was working as an aerial fitter/mobile dj, Stephen & Christine even let him use there phone number for his aerial adverts in local papers as he lived in keighley and they had a bradford number so he wouldn't loose work. The guy is total chancer and parasite, DON'T BUY ANY THING FROM AAREFF.

jax wrote:As 3 mtr jim stated the pll transmitters stephen sold evolved from a vfo exciter that operated at quarter of the frequency with a pll that was programmed with wire jumpers, this then evolved into the 50meg version with virtually the same pll circuit with a few improvements such as dip switch frequency selection way before paul hollings got involved.

A bit later on, I helped with the further evolution of the PLL PRO III. It was my suggestion to use the 74HC4059, because we wanted to get away from using a "programming chart" and the BCD code inputs (and the lack of a reset period) would allow a move to BCD rotary switches (when he'd used up all the DIP switches!). These would have directly shown the selected frequency. I also designed a frequency display for the rig - which would have been the first NRG product to contain a PIC! I also added the OLPD to the board layout, so that the output was switched off (by raising the emitter voltage on the driver stage).

I redesigned his little PRO III stereo coder so that it knew its left from its right, and the input sockets on the board could be correctly labelled. I also added the facility to switch to mono, and the two LEDs (to match the PRO III exciter) which indicated mono and stereo. The modifications radically improved his old basic product and made it sufficiently different from the "Veronica" thing (that didn't know its left from its right and put big spurs out 4.684MHz either side of the carrier because of the poor board layout).

The PRO IV Stereo coder was my design. It was something I'd been playing with for a while, and Stephen wanted a new product that would made his range stand out more from the charlatan down the street. I took a Veroboard prototype up there, and Stephen and I spend a day laying out the PCB. We etched and drilled a couple of prototypes, and populated the boards with the ICs I'd brought along for the purpose. One minor improvement to the design involved a cut track and an earth strap (to reduce a tiny hum), and we were astonished by how good the thing sounded. The measured results were amazing - the noise, distortion, separation, phase accuracy, and frequency responses (and lack of spurs) were all superb. They even got sold to a lot of professional, commercial broadcasters, and they are still in widespread use in many countries in their 1U 19" rack version with balanced audio inputs.

Stephen's oscillator was a dual Hartley type, derived from the "Kallitron" oscillator developed in the 1930s (by Cheirix and Mesney), and had a number of things to recommend it. Even without the PLL, it was quite stable, and if the capacitors were carefully chosen, and the coils made from sufficiently stiff wire, it would largely stay put. The big bonus was that it was "self-doubling" and developed the Band II signal when the two oscillators were cross-coupled. There's a sort of "current robbing" phenomenon going on, and the two oscillators inherently synchronise themselves with the right phase relationship to double their basic frequency. It also has the benefit that the highest frequency the PLL has to sample will be 54 MHz. This can easily be counted by cheap 74LS TTL ICs. The output of the oscillator was fed through a highpass filter to eliminate any small ½f content that could otherwise leak through due to minor component tolerance imbalances. Steps were taken in the component selection and in the board layout to ensure the closest balance possible.

Another innovation of mine was to use FETs to do the sampling from the oscillator, and we also experimented with diode switching of capacitors into the oscillator (selected by the 4059 programming lines) to select the part of the band the oscillator was going to. This eliminated the trimmers altogether, but never went into production.

Incidentally, if you short the two bigger square pads beneath the 2SC1947 with a piece of flat copper braid (taking care not to short anything else out) you'll increase the gain of the final stage and the board will give >5 Watts ight across the band.

Incidentally, there's a subtlety in the driver stage - it doesn't give the same power out across the band. The final needs a few extra milliwatts at 108 and fewer at 87.5, so a gain slope was introduced to the driver to flatten out the output power.

The Hollings rubbish never managed the performance of Stephen's gear. Hollings lost in court (I was an expert witness), and it cost him a lot of money. We demonstrated that Stephen's designs actually were his, and that the Hollings products were just poor, cut price copies with very inferior performance.

Unfortunately, Stephen also had to pay out a lot in legal fees as there were no costs awarded.

Brings back memories, Steve was a great guy always use to give me extra power rigs and even for a lot of people he use to give few weeks until getting there rig ready for me it use to be within days.

And after his stroke Steve's speech was affected.

RIP Steve will never be forgotton and Albert thanks for the info

i no moss i passed and not meant to offend ok im just stating a fact and yes paul has got a bbc meeting as pic on his page on facebook look harder mate

I've got a picture of myself shaking the hand of a county mayor - doesn't mean I was employed by the county council...

Come to think of it, so has another person that used to regularly post on here.

http://www.aareff.com/en/200w-fm-transmitter.htm

tell me this is stevens same design ??

no disrespect i remember him being in u=ireland my freind always got stuff from him

i have 1 i cant upload the pic as its to big of a file

its 1 of the original veronicafm.com pll crystal 75 w with the wires no way to tune it inside but to get it done by some1 with a ociliscope and freq counter anytime u wanted to change i recently had a 15w driver aswell pll from ste moss to drive a 200w amp

ohh and i had for a breif moment well 2 weeks a ver 3 NRG KITS 150watter and it was a pure disapointment needed to be kept cool all the time so compared to the aareff 200watt that never needed to be kept cool in ireland not a cold country whats better to have cold air to cool it down on the NRG or place your TRANSMITTER WHERE U LIKE WITHOUT HAVING TO WORRY IFF THERE IS COOL AIR GETTIN TO IT

I WILL ALWAYS USE AAREFF NOTHING ELSE AND I HAVE TRYD THE LOTT NOTHING COMPARES TO THE AAREFF TRANSMITTERS FACT