Who am I?

Well, I am just a regular young man from northern Germany loved and raised by his parents. But first things first…

My name is Florian Meißner (yes, with a sharp S 😉 ), born in August 1989 and the founder of Discovering Eagle. During my childhood I lived in Celle, a small town in Lower Saxony, Germany. My father Volkhart worked as a meteorologist for the German Army and my mom, Regina, used to be a teacher in high school. Also I do have a younger brother, Nico, with whom I share my passion for aviation and tinkering.

We both got that passion from our father who needed to do something all the time. After altering our house several times and building almost all furniture himself, he turn to building his own airplane. That is where I learned my basics in maintaining my own airplane “Chickadee”. Even as a child I used to disassemble all my toys but back than most times I didn’t get them back together.

What do I do for a living?

Eventually my passion for tinkering developed into a profession. Since elementary school I was highly interested in electronics and in 2009 I started my apprenticeship as an Electrician for Automation Control with a company in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. From there I graduated in summer of 2012 and in 2013 I was finally able to visit one of our plants in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States were I worked in the body shop maintenance department for almost the entire year.

After returning back to Germany, I moved from maintenance into the development department where I became the lead employee with regards to measurement equipment, test setups and so on at the test benches for electric car engines.

With the beginning of 2020 my second passion got a chance to turn into an profession. In early high school I got in contact with HTML “programming” where our class was tasked with creating a new webpage for our school. Well, things added up and now, almost two decades later, I wrapped up several languages as well as multiple platforms. Most of this is self-taught over almost 15 years.

• HTML 4/5
• CSS 2/3
• JavaScript
• PHP
• C on AVR microcontrollers
• Python as command line program, GUIs with Tkinter, or websites with Django
• Java and JavaFX
• MySQL, MariaDB, H2, SQlite
• Shell (mostly bash) and Batch scripting
• Administration of Ubuntu (Desktop and Server)

My Hobbies

Just to write one or two sentences wouldn’t do justice to all my hobbies and passions. So let’s start at the beginning.

Aviation

Since my parents are both active pilots, it was quite natural for me to start flying, too. After spending several weekends at the airfield as a child, I started my glider training in Germany in 2004.

During my time in the US in 2013 I took the opportunity to get my Private Pilot Airplane rating which I achieved in mid summer. During fall I also wrapped up the US glider rating and during another visit in 2018 the airplane aerotow endorsement.

The first December week of 2014 was also quite an event. After scouring the internet for almost a year I finally found “my” airplane. It was a Luscombe 8E build in 1948 being for sale in Louisville, Kentucky, US. After several phone calls with the previous owner, I agreed to fly over from Germany to take a look and eventually buy it. In the background I had already ordered a shipping container to the airport and while trying to check in in Berlin I had quite fun trying to explain why I go on “holidays” in the middle of winter with a suitcase full of tools. Well, mid January 2015 N1990B finally arrived at my home airfield Celle-Arloh EDVC in Germany and I fly her ever since.

Programming

Even before taking my current position as as software developer, I used to tinker with several programming languages. Some of my work is available for download on this homepage. For example I wrote and maintain several custom data plugins for my favorite aviation app SkyDemon of which some became incorporated in SD’s own data.

HAM Radio

Somewhat in order to not leave the electronics completely I joined the German Amateur Radio Club (DARC) in March 2020 as well as their regional chapter H24 Wolfsburg. End of July 2020 I finally got my Novice HAM Radio License (E-Lizenz) in Goettingen, Germany and my callsign DO1MRV.

After I got my Youth Leader Certificate (Juleica) in July 2020, I also took over H24’s youth group and do some experiments with them. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 held us down, too.

You can see more about my venture into the most expensive form of free telecommunication in the HAM radio category.