About this website

www.giangrandi.ch is a non-profit web site. It's just intended for sharing information and simple design tools about subjects I care, like electronics, ham radio, antennas, algorithms, photography, physics,...

The philosophy behind it is simple: a very light page layout, with no pop-ups, no advertising and no sponsors to make it easier for you to read. Very simple pages with no useless animations, no flashing colors, limited graphics, no frames, no complicated menus and no need of fancy plugins to make it faster to load and more portable.

Many pages makes large use of JavaScript to implement simple calculators that, I hope, can be handy in many situations. A nice feature of JavaScript is that it runs on any internet-connected device without installing any extra package and offers much more computing power than a scientific calculator. The source code is in the .html page itself, so that you can easily make a working local copy if you want: just click in your browser File - Save as... (or something similar).

If you wonder why I built and I keep updating this website, there are several reasons: first because I think technical information, knowledge and experience should be shared and should be free. There are a lot simple tricks and interesting circuits that may be very handy, but are so hard to find if written on a piece of paper or when printed in an old dusty book: information in a website is much easier to search than looking into thousands of sheets of paper, and is perfect for sharing. I hope you may find here something useful or interesting. But of course, I do it also for myself, so that I can keep track of what I do.

I also wish to say thank you to Cleto Pescia who hosts this web site and makes this possible.

About me

My name is Iacopo Giangrandi and I always had a fascination with electronics: when I was 6 I built my first electric circuit: two light-bulbs and a battery. When I was 8 I got a soldering iron and my first transistor, and when I was 14 I finally got an oscilloscope, and I still have it. So I decided to study electronics and I ended up with a degree in electrical engineering of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL). Even if electronics is now my daily job and I have been doing it for several decades, I still enjoy it and I have a lot of fun in home-brewing any kind of circuit.

I also discovered the magic of the radio when I was very young. The idea of hearing (or contacting) the other side of the world with some simple home-built circuit and a piece of wire hanging down a tree still amazes me. Of course, I'm also a radio amateur and my call-sign is HB9DUL, but I'm not very active on the air: I have much more fun in building a radio than in using it!

If you want to send me your comments feel free to e-mail at the following address: