Edward E. Wells Jr.

Welcome to my personal web page. Well, I'm in the process of completely replacing www.wells.com web page, and all of the associated pages, so I'll probably get to finish my own page last. Isn't that the way it goes?

Basically, I have many interest. Electronics, computer design, computer programming, ham radio, playing theater organ, MIDI music, riding my Goldwing Motorcycle, flying, and a lot more.

The Organ Rebuilding Project

I have many project always going at once. One that I'm in the process of planning for it to get ready to completely rebuild my Horse shoe shaped, 3 keyboard theater organ with a brand new MIDI design. It will incorporate many things. One desire is to capture the sounds of the Wanamaker's Organ, from downtown Philadelphia. This is a tremendous instrument. It's the largest playing pipe organ in the world. As well as the Wanamaker's sound, I plan to add General MIDI, GS Midi, and many other sound samples.
The goal is to completely write the programming in an object oriented fashion. This will help to keep the job very organized, and very maintainable. It will probably be written in C++ and/or Java.

There will be several microprocessors, one for processing each keyboard, one for the pedalboard, one main processor for coordinating communication with a large MIDI disc library and the other processors. I'm looking into using small embedded processors for each key, possibly the MicroChip 16Cxx series. I'm opened to ideas, so it if you have any suggestions, I'm all ears! We're still in the planning and design phases. The goal is to have the processing required for each key handled by a smart chip, analyzing the position, velocity and attack on each key. I'll have more information here later.

Ham Radio

First, on ham radio, I am N3IAS. I've been around ham radio since my single digit years. It's now almost 40 years later, and I'm still interested in radio. I've been around commercial, CB and ham radio services for years. I've built a lot of my own equipment, oscillators, audio amplifiers, RF amplifiers, various pieces of digital equipment, and a lot of utility type devices.

I grew up around my good friend, Vince Shroad/K3ZQN. Vince was an inspiration to me in my early years, showing me his latest invention, new radio equipment that he would be developing, and his ham radio shack (a rather large hobby that most hams would only drool over). Vince would take surplus equipment and make all kinds of new useful equipment. At times, he would design and build things from scratch, like his own RTTY interface, or his own multi-band Single Side Band Transceiver.

Vince was also a civil servant to our country in the 60's and 70's, providing valuable communications services to many during the Vietnam war years, through his affiliation with Navy/MARS (Military Affiliate Radio System). After a period of time, Vince became the area MARS director for Navy/MARS in the Philadelphia area.

Vince was very encouraging about helping me to learn electronics, show me resources that would later help me build a career, and was just a great friend to have known. Unfortunately, Vince past away in the summer of 2001.

As digital modes became more popular, I was contacted by a few friends in the late 80's that encouraged me to study the morse code (my thorn) and get my own ham radio license. I did that in 1988 and got my Novice license (KA3VRV), and the upgraded to my Tech license (N3IAS) shortly after the Novice license showed up. This gave me the VHF/UHF privledges that I needed to operate the more common bands where packet radio was mostly used.