Waterton National Park, Canada, 1995

Home page of Johannes Kneip, DG3RBU

I was born in 1967 and spent my whole youth in Regensburg in the heart of bavaria. After high school and military service I studied electronics at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Graduating in 1992, I left bavaria and joined the Laboratorium für Informationstechnologie (LFI). Working on the HiPAR project, I joined my PhD in electrical engineering in 1997. Since end of 1997 I am working with Bosch, Advanced Development Multimedia Systems, where I am project lead for a DSP design project for MPEG-4.

                                    Some of my most favourite things in life

Though my profession is purely technical, I have a lot of technical and non-technical hobbies. Most of my (little) spare time I try to spend out in nature.

Mountains
Currently, I am living in the north of Germany, which is REALLY flat (some say, if you spill some milk, it will directly propagate into the north sea - 250km away!). But I was raised close to the bavarian mountains in the south of germany and began mountain hiking and skiing pretty early in my life. Still today, I take every opportunity to climb a mountain - either in the alps in Bavaria, Austria or Switzerland. At least once a year I try to start out into a more remote area: Summer 1994 I spent in the american midwest, 1995 in the volcanic area of new Zealand's North Island, 1996 in the Canadian Rockies, 1997 in Australia and 1998 in the Canadian Rockies again. While hiking and observin nature, plants and animals, I often find the inner silence so necessary in this fast moving multimedia society.
Have a look on some of my travel impressions here!

Amateur Radio
I am a ham for almost ten years now (Callsign: DG3RBU). Most of my interest there is in wireless digital data transmission, especially "Packet Radio". I joined work on hard- and software with Flori, DL8MBT in 1989. First projects included "DIGICOM>64", a software-modem combination for the Commodore C64, which paved the way to Packet Radio for many hams - instead of an expensive terminal controller ("TNC") you just had to plug a simple modem into your C64. Everything else was done by Flori's superb software on the C64. In 1991 we switched the platform to the IBM PC - since then three versions of a terminalprogram and more than 20 varieties of modems, slotcards and interfaces have been developed under the label "BayCom". If you are interested in this stuff, go and have a look on the BayCom home page!

Books
Reading good books is another hobby of me. Because I deal around with this communications and multimedia stuff the whole day, I do not use TV to relax. Instead of this, at least one or two hours of reading is important for me to make my day. A lot of things I read is about history of technics and science, but also biographies of any kind and good fiction literature are my preferred readings. Have a look on the books I liked most from the last few months! As you will see, most of this literature is in english - when beeing at home I rarely take the time to go through the book shops. But when going abroad, I spend a lot of time roaming through book stores and good CD shops.

Scuba Diving
I obtained a scuba brevet in 1997 and did some diving in the east sea and some north german lakes since then. But a really unforgettable experience were some days of diving at the great barrier reef in australia end of 1997 - have you ever been swimming in a colourful fish soup? I really have to go back to this place!

Motorbiking
For years I have had friends driving a motorbike and really loving. For myself, I was never so much fond of it - until in 1997 I had some spare time and decided to go for a motorbike driving licence. After three hours of practicing and the first cross-country drives I was completely overwhelmed by this really great feeling... 14 days after getting my licence I bought my first bike - a HONDA CBR600F. I do not like it so much because it is a sport bike where you can go on speeding, but because it is a very light, silent and powerful vehicle - really optimal for cruising a nice and windy cross country road.

But the most important thing of all:
I enjoy every moment in my live - wherever I am and how good or bad times are!