About Armin Gräwe

You want to know more about me ? ... ok, here we go ...

I was born in April 1957 and live in Münster - Nienberge since 1960, a little village in the northwestern part of Germany.
I am married to my wife Susan and live together with her since 1981.
We have two sons born in 1992 and 1996.

I made my hobby to my business which is a communication electronic engineer. Already as a child I was playing with electronics and at the age of 6 I did my first TV reapair (the fault was a capacitor in the deflection circuit). At the age of 14 I joined the newcomer group of the German Amateur Radio Club and got at the age of 16 my first Amateur Radio licence. My current Amateur Radio call is DF1QE.

At school my notes had been an interesting mixture. (Remember in Germany 1 means best, 6 means worst) In classes like history, german and english ! :-) my notes were steady between 4 and 5. While in classes like physics, chemistry and biology my notes usually were between 1 and 2. Sometimes teachers really did not know what to do with me. Actually I was realy lazy at school, especially with homework. Anyhow I made a good graduation.

After school I got an apprenticeship at a communication electronic company. I had a step training as "electro technician", "communication electronic technician" and "high level electronic technician". At last I upgraded as "radio communication electronic engineer". Most of the completitions were noted 1 to 2.
(sorry for this difficult description but I tried my best to make it understandable because these job names are not exact translatable into english. Also I'm actually not a real engineer in sense of german law, but for the rest of the world this description fits)

Since in the company I did my apprenticeship there was no career development for me I changed to a company which was in the ships navigation electronic business. I started there as a field service engineer and travelled across whole Germany and the Netherlands, to all places where harbours were. I got very familiar with the strange atmosphere of a harbour which I still like.

But partly it was a hard job, often I had to travel up to 700 miles a day. During this time I also began to like high speed cars.

Later on I became the manager of the radio communication service lab in this company. This resulted in a mix of field and office work which I liked very much.

Because of the big recession in regional german shipping the navigation electronics company I worked for went bancrupt and had to close. But I had a very good contract so the receivership had to pay me without doing some work for them. This resulted in a nice vacation of half a year for me. During this time I thought over to open my own company.

Said and done, so in 1983 the "Armin Gräwe Funkelektronik" was founded, a little family company in which besides me my father, my wife and temporarily some employees are working.

The "Armin Gräwe Funkelektronik" started by continuing the navigation electronic sevice but then developed more activities in radio mobile communication and cellular networks as well as wired communication. Nowadays the "Armin Gräwe Funkelektronik" is busy in nearly all kind of electronics business, especially in developing electronics and offering system solutions.

It's unbelivable how much of menpower and time such a company needs and if I see how much money is left after substraction of costs and taxes, I often wonder why I am doing such a lot of work.

Because the day has 24 hours only and I need 6-7 hours of sleep (this should be abolished) there is not much free time left for me. If however there is some time left I often use it for some technical stuff again, amateur radio. Also from time to time my wife and my kids want to see me.

Another important thing for me is my love to the open nature. I like to take long walks through the woods and fields. In the summertime I like swimming naked in the nearby lakes, and also like to do that at night. I like very much to sit around with good friends and have long chats. Anyhow I'm a night-active man as well in working as in free time. Some of my nights I spend (as you supposely know) in the net. Maybe a bit too much of time. *smile*
In sports I do not much but the one thing I do regularly, at least once a week, is to visit the sauna. I have there a good time relaxing, also in our climatic region it's nessesary to stay healthy during the winter.

Around 1985 I began collecting mice. Not living ones but any others. Nowadays I have some hundreds of objects, most of them are stuffed toy mice. My mania goes so far that in 1997 I got a mouse tattoo on my stomach :-)

I think I'm a very tolerant man and have a good sense of humor.