Hello! I'm Stephen John Birkill, born Barnsley, Yorkshire about 60 years ago, and now living in Sheffield. I have spent most of my life blissfully ignorant of the whole genealogy 'hobby' (no offence intended to purists or professionals) and with a vanishingly small interest in pursuing my own family history. In fact to my regret I don't even know my own grandchildren, as I became estranged some years ago from the two sons of my first marriage. My father (Arthur, now deceased), was similarly indifferent to family history, though in his later years he became aware of distant cousins living in Australia and South Africa, descended from the same Barnsley Birkill clan.

However, in the past few months my wife Carole has been bitten (mildly) by the genealogy bug, and has in her usual efficient and meticulous way compiled a vast and almost unprintable (on account of its size, that is!) document tracing my ancestors in Yorkshire and hers in Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire, and their siblings, back to the 17th Century and in some cases beyond. In tracking down this data, she has come upon a wealth of Birkill-related material on the Web, and it is this I shall endeavour (as a first step) to catalogue here...

...but this is almost as far as I've got!

Still, here, to get my own aliases out of the way, are my other Web presences:

Real-World Technology Ltd. is the electronics design company Carole and I run. You'll note the Website is looking rather shabby and uncared-for. This is because since the mid-90s it hasn't been a principal source of new business for the company -- most of our work comes through our established reputation in the world of digital entertainment media, and our order book is full.

We've made a habit of providing subsystems which have empowered consumer cost breakthroughs in the new programme-delivery technologies as they've come along. For example I set up one of the world's first home satellite TV receiving systems here in Sheffield in 1975 -- you may remember the film and interviews on Blue Peter, Look North, Newsnight and News at Ten. The low-cost technologies developed went to help power the US 'Home TVRO' (backyard dish) boom of the early 1980s, and later satellite TV in Europe.

Then in 1988 RWT developed the tuner for the Amstrad (analogue) satellite receiver for Sky TV via the Astra satellite, enabling the £199 dish and set-top box package. Amstrad made 6 million of those in the Far East. More recently, we provided the "SetPal" tuner design for NovaPal, Daewoo, Fusion and others, which resulted in the £99 price point and take-off of Freeview digital TV boxes. Another success was the tuner for the Venice series of DAB modules for Frontier Silicon, which enabled the £99 kitchen radio for Pure Digital, and is still used in the majority of UK digital radios today.

So I trust visitors will forgive the outdated look of the RWT Website!

The DX Forum. RWT's success owes much to my childhood fascination in doing things with radio and TV reception that conventional wisdom judged impossible. When I was 16 in Barnsley I would bore fascinate my schoolmates with demonstrations of Russian or Danish TV reception, and a couple of years later I established my own amateur television links across England.

All this kind of long-distance stuff is known to its aficionados as "DX", and DX in its many forms has a huge following among radio amateurs and others. A few years ago I happened to notice the sheer number of disparate mailing lists, responders, bulletin boards and newsgroups dedicated to DX, and thought that I might provide a forum on the Web for all its enthusiasts to exchange ideas instantaneously -- something that couldn't have existed when I was young. So the DX Forum was born.

Unfortunately it became a casualty of my workload -- I never found the time to give it sufficient promotion in all the other appropriate spots on the Internet, so its usage never reached critical mass: without an active core of members such a network rapidly falls out of use. However I've not yet had the heart to delete it!

The Pete Atkin Website. Now this one is a real success. Only a few people will remember Pete Atkin from the early '70s, but he was a quite unique English singer and songwriter, who wrote in a style bordering on folk, jazz and rock (but not really classifiable under any genre until someone invented the phrase "English Chanson" a few years back), and toured the UK (including Sheffield!) with a rock band. But his lyrics were easily the most literate in pop, because they were written by intellectual, poet, critic, humorist and essayist (and soon to become TV personality), Clive James. Pete and Clive's work gained quite a cult following, especially among students at the time, and was championed by the BBC's greatest DJs, Kenny Everett and John Peel. While never troubling the pop charts, Pete did release six albums and became widely respected in the music business, but suffered, among much else that was good, from the seismic shift in attitudes that characterised the punk revolution of the mid-seventies.

But Pete was still around, working as a BBC radio producer and living in Bristol, and in 1996 I resolved to help relaunch his musical career with the help of the Internet. Ten years on and we've seen CD reissues of all his albums, new and unreleased material on two new CDs, and UK and world tours with Clive James. In 2006 we celebrated 10 years of the revival with a concert in Sheffield.