Thank you for choosing to read some background information on who and what is behind the design work of the new, miniaturized EGG.
My name is Gerrie Goeree and I was born 10th of September 1962. I was raised in a city called Stadskanaal which is in the province Groningen of the Netherlands. I lived there for 33 years until in 1995 I moved to Schoonebeek in the province Drenthe to live together with my current wife Lenie. We now have a son Robin, who is also getting more interested in what I am doing outside of my daytime job as Radio Design Engineer within SonyEricsson.
One of my biggest hobbies is radio-amateurism. This started already when I was only 10 years old, as I was fascinated by an old tube radio that I took apart. This interest gradually increased until I was building my own receivers and transmitters. The use of transmitters was however not allowed without a permit from the local postal authorities, so I had to do my exam to apply for a license. Back in 1983 I took my last exam for the broadest type of license. This resulted in my call-sign PA3EXV. Call-signs are like license-plates of cars, they are used amongst radio-amateurs world-wide to get into contact with each other. The country of origin is coupled to this call-sign and due to this, once heard in your receiver, the location of the other radio-amateur can be found. To be able to achieve big distances, large aerials are needed. In picture 1 you can see my current antenna that is mainly hand-built during evening and weekends. In the background is the moon, which at sometime in the future will be used as reflector. The aim with this is to be able to get in contact with remote radio-amateurs (like USA) on very high frequencies, where radio-waves are not able to follow the curved earth as they do on short-wave, where the frequencies below 30MHz are used. To give an idea of the dimensions: the dish-antenna has a diameter of 1.6 meters, all other antenna's are longer than 5 meters from front to end.
Local groups of radio-amateurs tend to gather once a month for exchanging latest information, and this is where I came in contact with Jan van Muijlwijk, PA3FXB. Jan is very interested in the human voice and for that reason he was around one day in the lab in Groningen where Harm Schutte is working. One day he asked me if I would be interested in helping Harm and Don in designing and building an EGG. Jan knew from me that I had some possibilities to produce small numbers of devices.
That is were the story EGG started, back in 2003. The idea came up of producing a number of affordable EGGs to sell together with VoceVista software that was already in a pretty mature state. The only problem with available EGGs until then was the high price, which was a problem for most of the users that Don had in mind: singers rather than scientists. Jan brought me in contact to Harm and from that time on I was heavily involved in the development and production of the new, miniaturized EGG.
It started with a so-called spiderweb board filled with electronic components. This working method is used among electronic designers and radio-amateurs a lot because of the ease of changing components and the good electrical grounding for the components. In picture 2 you can see what this kind of method looks like.
It consists of a base plate from PCB material fully filled with copper. This copper acts as a ground layer. All components that need to be grounded have a very short wire length. This is important because the EGG works with high frequency waveforms that are easy distorted by external influences. Once the result was satisfactory, I went to the next stage, and that was to re-design the spiderweb design into a real printed circuit board. This design was build into a plastic housing and started already to act like an EGG should. In the beginning I personally had no real feeling with the signals that came from the EGG, so every time I drove over to Harm's lab or Don's house to have the updates evaluated. The results improved step by step until we got a design that was ready for production.
In picture 3 this early prototype is shown. It is clear why this is not ready for production yet; There are lots of wires running inside that consume a lot of valuable production time and besides this, there was not a microphone input and amplifier-stage foreseen. This microphone input turned out to be very useful for VoceVista software: it gives the user the possibility to align the acoustical signal to the EGG signal and thus being able to read and understand the signals better.
Now it was time to have some professionals involved in the project. A company named Variass was found to mount all the components onto the printed circuit boards, a knitting studio was involved for knitting the neckstraps, and I assigned myself the job of preparing all the plastic housings to mount the printed circuit boards in. Once finished, some of the EGGs were send to 'pioneer' users to have feedback. It turned out that the signal-quality could be improved and all the finished parts were updated to meet the very high quality standard Don was aiming for. One clear fact about surface mounted devices is that changing components by hand is a job that takes lots of extra hoursÉ Finally we succeeded and the units were ready to be sold. Picture 4 shows me at work, searching for the needed improvements.
To all users I would like to say that we have done our utmost to deliver a system that is made to serve the users for many years. Operated according the Getting started and Guidelines for safe use sections, we are sure that you will enjoy using.
