Beacon photo page's by Johan Veldhuis.  

About this site - by Wim van Beek

Progress

In Dec. 2008 we are moved to a new host and we claimed a .nl URL
Alas, I have a big backlog in the work to get all Johan's pictures in pages. That's the reason that I have started making pages without text. The link in the table for those pages is in red or in green.
Unfortunately we use HTML4 and CSS1 for the site and Google prefers nowadys HTML5 and CSS3 and therefore al pages - over 1000 - has to be changed. That is a lot of work. The idee is to compleet the pages while I rewrite them to HTML5. I got some help with my English pages and wil do correcting all existing pages with rewriting to the new version.
You are now looking at a the test version in HTML5.

Browsers

I am using four brouwsers when testing this site: Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Ege.
At home I use Firefox for browsing the Internet.
Recommandation: If possible use the latest version of your brouwser. That wil give the best result.

As Johan told in his story, I'm the bloke who puts his collection beacon pictures and sounds together so it becomes a website. That's more in my line of things.
Johan and I met more then 45 years ago at BDXC meetings. In 1990 Johan told me about aviation beacons, listening to it and trying to locate them to make pictures of them. I had knowledge of the location of two of those beacons because I had seen them when passing by (NV and RR), without knowing what they where. And so we start at occasions to trace them together. When we traveled trough England in 2005 I asked Johan if he had thought about publishing his pictures on the internet. The result you find on this site.
All beacons then in Johan's collection except one are included in the site.
Johan has on this moment pictures of beacons from the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and France.
We just started in 2004 with digital photography. A lot of pictures from the Netherlands have been made 'old fashion style' and had to go by flatbed scanner. Johan and I have also made separately and together some trips to make some new digital pictures of some of those beacons.
In 2004 Johan started with making sound recordings of the beacons. Until 2010 I made those into MP3 files and they are also in these pages included. But in October 2020 I have started with work on tapes of recent years, now using the Audacity program. It takes sometimes a whole day just to make the recordings on a C90 compact cassette tape into mp3 files.

The way it works

We've chosen for a simple layout. A navigation frame at the left and the main page at the right. You use the table's to go to the pages with the beacon pictures. That's still the same. The button at the top and bottem of a beacon-page have disappearedand and are now in the navigation block.
There was a drawing of a music note on the page, to hear the a sound recording of the beacon. In HTML5 there is a audio control bar. Sound recordings are at everage 30 to 40 seconds in length.
When we started we've reduced the pictures mostly to max 400 pixels width/height. Also we used a lot of JPEG compression. Of course this gives some less quality. This was because a lot of persons had to work with slow internetconnections. For the same reason we made the MP3 in mono - well, beacons are mono - and also reduced them in bit rate. But even so they take some time to load.
Nowadays most persons have a lot faster internet so now I use pictures a bit larger (max 600px) and a bit less compressed.

At this moment there are some links to other websites, and there is a button to my site where you find the stories about some of our beacon trips and the building of a Long-wave loop antenna.

Johan and I like to hear your opinion about this site.
If your native language is French or German, and you find it difficult to write us in English, then you may use French or German to mail me (button "e-mail WvB"). I will answer you in English, sorry, but my written French and German is not very good.
And I specially hope to receive your corrections in case my English is not correct.

Send us a message...

With the form here under you can send us a message.
If you don't like to answer a question, just let it blanc.
The form results are send to us as an e-mail. Possibly there will be some "are you sure" warnings!

If you like to send us a "normal" e-mail, there are two buttons onder the form available.

If you like to send an e-mail without using the form above, please use one of those buttons. Mail to Wim can be in Dutch, English, German and French. But you will get an answer in Dutch or English.

e-mail JVe Send an e-mail to Johan.
e-mail WvB Send an e-mail to Wim.

Links

Benelux DX Club
Radio listning amateur club. Members are listning to all kind of radio en tv frequencies. Lots of links to interesting DX sites.

Radio-pagina.nl
Site made by Han Hardonk, former BDXC Webmaster. Lots of interisting links.

Beaconworld & beaconworld.fotopic
Beaconworld was for years the site for the beacon enthausiast. Alas the webmaster Alan Gale has stoped most of his activities, but he saved the photo part of his site. And there are still the links to other beacon photo sites. In june 2011 we wrote here: Alas this site has beem closed.
But the most of Alan's material has appeared at "The NDB list" website.
ndb list "Photo Gallery", to see the beacon photo's and links to sites with beacon photo's.
ndblist.info with lots of information, earlier found on beaconworld.
A lot of information for beacon DXers

eurocontrol - European AIS Database - EAD
For information about airports and beacons in Europ, this is the place to be. For most countries in Europ there is lots of information on this site.
But you have to know how to find this information. So, here under a route to lots of flight info.
2019: Some things here are changed. I tried to discribe as good as possible how it will work now.

1. Choose in the left column "ead basic" and - if you haven't done that - register.
2. Choose "simple mode - plain html" beause even with java running I got stuck in the java optie.
3. After registering you get an e-mail with your password.
4. Login, and on the next page choose ˂accept terms and conditions˃ .
5. Choose from the menu AIP library
6. Choose the country you need under ˂Authority (Code)˃
7. When necesary choose ˂Authority Type˃ - some countries have separate info for Civil en Military.
8. Choose ˂AIP Type˃. Possebilities are:
   • ---
   • AIP - for info about aerobeacons, see GEN 2.5 and ENR 4.1
   • AMDT
   • AIC
   • Charts
9. Choose ˂AIP part˃. Possebilities are:
   • ---
   • GEN
   • ENR
   • AD
10. You filled in all choices, than click on ˂Search˃.