Milestones in my Life
I was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1953, on January 5; my father was chief of the Plant Protection department in the Ministry of Agriculture in Romania and my mother worked in a publishing house, as a designer. My father passed away in 2000 and my mother in 2023. My sister Anca, was born in 1954, she is a physician (retired in 2023) and currently lives in the USA.I went to the primary school in 1960 which I finished in 1968 (in Romania, the primary school extends to the first 8 school years); then I followed the classes of one of the most respected gymnasiums in Romania: the Lazar Gymnasium in Bucharest, which is also one of the oldest. I graduated in May 1972.
In August 1972 I started working as a junior technician in the Plant Protection Research Institute in Bucharest; the first 6 month of this work were completely uninteresting, as I worked in a chemical laboratory. Later on, I joined the team of Dr. Rafaila Constantin, a well known researcher in prognosis and disease forecast theory. Subsequently I played a decisive role throughout the existence of the team. On the other hand, the liberal and motivating atmosphere in the team would stimulate my creativity and probably influenced my way of thinking for the rest of my professional life.
Meanwhile, in 1972 I enrolled the Academy of Economics in Bucharest to study Agricultural Economics. It was a difficult time, because I had a full-time job at the Institute, but needed to dedicate a large amount of time to the study.
Between 1975 and 1976 I was involved in the design and implementation of a new disease forecasting system, using electronics and radio to control the state of infection for certain plant diseases. It was one of the first telemetry systems in the world to employ digital circuitry and protocols (most systems at that time where analog based). I led a team who designed successively three different generations of this system, in 1975, 1978 and 1981 respectively; these where manufactured on a small scale and successfully installed throughout Romania.
In December 1976 I married Ioana Lambru; in 1977 I graduated the University and in 1979 got my Master Degree in Business Administration. In 1982 (between begin of May and end of August) I fulfilled my military duties in the Romanian Army.
One of my hobbies is amateur radio. Wireless communication fascinated me since I was a kid. I built my first MW radio at 14 and my first transmitter at 16. In 1974 I got my official radio amateur call-sign (YO3BEJ, subsequently changed to YO3NP in 1983). In 1976 I led a group of three people—self-named “Lixco”, to design in their free time an affordable, high performance short wave amateur radio transceiver. This was the birth of the Lixco A412. A kit of boards and full documentation was put together and sold at a modest price. Almost 800 kits have been sold until 1982, after which the documentation was given for free to anybody wanting to reproduce the boards and manuals (the project became “open source”). Several thousands A412 have been since built.
In 1982 a special team was formed within the Plant Protection Research Institute, aiming to design electronic equipment and software to assist and ease activities in plant protection research; I led this team until I left the Institute in 1990. The team managed a series of successful projects during my tenure, to name but a few: an 8-bit microcomputer (that went into industrial production), a computerized image analysis system for qualitative and quantitative analysis of spraying (“Picomet”), a project for an electrostatic spraying machine, various measuring & control equipment. Two patents resulted out of these activities.
The underground company Lixco (as private companies were not allowed in Romania at that time) grew to five people and embarked on ambitious projects: the Lixco B881 microcomputer was released in 1985 mostly for radio amateurs. Another revolutionary project was a Direct Digital Synthesis (DDS) based PLL for the A412 transceiver (1989). The company flourished, also due to the specific software that Lixco members developed and sold.
In January 1986 my wife and I got a daughter, Roxana.
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