In my own case, I too started off with making a radio when I was eight, about 1973, but with some help from the old man as we did a single transistor version. I tinkered with various other non radio related electronics like amplifiers, as my uncle was a field repair tech for electronic typewriters at the time, as well as a radio ham. He used to give me old boards out of equipment and I'd scavenge the parts, and make oscillators etc.
When I was eleven, in 1976 we had an old computer at school, it filled an entired school room, and I learned Algol. The kids were left to their own devices, and we did electronics too. This introduced me to 74 series TTL and I designed and made a digital clock out of about 20 TTL chips, pretty impressive for my age I always think. In 1977/78, I built my own computer from someone else's design, another school kid in fact, just a hex keyboard and LEDs, but it worked, and I spent hours and hours writing machine code in raw hex, manually calculating jumps etc. In the end, by the age of 14 or 15 I was designing my own computers.
About 1981, CB finally hit the UK and I got a set. However it was pretty limiting and I took my ham exams a few months later and received my callsign around 1982. It was self-study too, I just read the books. In those days, although you could make RF stuff, it was hard because test equipment had very limited availabilty, so there were a lot of failed RF projects. In real terms, equipment was expensive, and we could only yearn after the radios advertised on the magazine pages. I did my own two-way digital RF link before packet radio became popular, it didn't work very well but it did at least work a bit. Most of what I did was homebrewing antennas badly and making computers work with radios.
Then at university I discovered booze and women and the electronics largely took a back seat to that and computers until the late 90s when I rekindled my RF and ham interest. I had a bit more money so could afford an oscilloscope at least. I spent a lot of time with antennas, particularly around 2.4GHz which is also a ham band, and this was before WiFi took off. I purchased a VNA for tuning the antennas, and I guess that was the start of doing RF at least reasonably seriously. The previous voodoo of RF was gradually making a bit of sense, the stars were aligning in my head.
I then got involved with space comms, and have been directly involved in a number of successful launches, from designing the telemetry and coding schemes to transponder design to hardware integration in the clean room.
So RF and embedded computing remains to this day my favourite poison, and I'm never more than moments away from a soldering iron.
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