Roamer.com » radio

Motorola to acquire controlling interest in Vertex Standard (Yaesu)

theDoc — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:41:06 +0000

Motorola announced today that it will launch a tender offer to acquire a controlling interest in Vertex Standard, the parent company of Yaesu. Upon successful completion of the tender offer and subsequent restructuring process, Motorola will own 80% of Vertex Standard and Tokogiken, a privately held Japanese company controlled by Jun Hasegawa, current president and CEO of Vertex Standard, will retain 20% forming a joint venture. The Board of Directors of Vertex Standard have expressed their support of the tender offer. “As a leading provider and pioneer in 2-way radio communication solutions, Motorola is an excellent strategic partner for our business”, said Jun Hasegawa, president and CEO of Vertex Standard. “The joint venture will give Vertex Standard access to Motorola’s global distribution channels, presenting considerable opportunities for Vertex Standard to drive growth. We also expect to reduce costs, as we will benefit from Motorola’s global scale and resources. With Motorola, Vertex Standard will be stronger and better positioned to deliver new and innovative 2-way radio solutions for professionals and consumers around the world”. The joint venture will expand and develop a comprehensive suite of products to address the rapidly growing demand for 2-way radio solutions. Vertex Standard’s strength in the Amateur, Marine and Airband segments will also provide Motorola with access to new business opportunities. In addition, Vertex Standard’s solutions are highly complementary with Motorola’s products and will add greater depth and breadth to Motorola’s Government and Public Safety business. The venture will also provide additional engineering talent for Motorola.

I’ve got my Amateur Radio Licence – Finally :-)

Roamer — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:07:31 +0000

Yes, I can’t quite believe it but, after my call to OfCom yesterday, and then an email off to the RSGB as well, I got a reply telling me that they had just done the detail transfer over to OfCom and that if I retried they were sure I’d be successful this time.

So, I logged on to the online licencing system, and miracle of miracles – I was able to proceed with my foundation licence application, but then onto my next problem – the callsign.

As this is only my foundation licence and I will be progressing as quickly as possible through the intermediate to the advance licence I shouldn’t have taken as much time as I did over choosing a callsign – but then, thats just me I guess. After an hour on the phone to a G7 mate of mine I finally decided upon M3VAO, which reads nicely both normally and phonetically.

So there we go, now I’ve got the licence I can start testing out some of my HF antenna designs and start having some fun talking through the local repeaters whilst out and about.

Superb, only 1 year and 2 weeks after starting the course (LoL I dare someone to ask why it’s taken sooo long) I’m finally licenced – WHOOOP!

-Roamer.

I’ve got my Amateur Radio Licence – close but no cigar :-(

Roamer — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:46:52 +0000

Well, after being a little bit hacked off this morning I decided to contact OfCom to see if there were any problems with my application and/or my candidate number, and to my suprise I got hold of a very helpful bloke who said that all was ok and we started going through my choices of callsigns. Fantastic I thought… although after alot of different callsign ideas – which all turned out to be already allocated – I was getting a bit despondent about the whole thing, then we tried a random one and it sounded ok, tripped off the tough quite easily and so I said yes to it. He told me to give it 15 mins so that he could sort it out on the systems his end, and that then I should be able to log into the online licence system and see my new licence there.

Oh how happy I was – for about 2 minutes.

The phone rang, and yes it was the guy from OfCom, telling me that they hadn’t infact had the data pushed through from the RSGB yet, and so that callsign wasn’t yet allocated to me, and that I should simply keep trying online, maybe this afternoon, or tomorrow, or possibly over the weekend, or maybe the start of next week. Bugger, yet again, I almost was licenced, but now I’m back to waiting, and my patience isn’t holding up well at this point, I mean, OfCom have spent loads to create this great online licencing system, but when it comes to an organisation feeding into this it seems that simply time isn’t of the essence.

I’ll try and be patient once again.