Recent Club Talks

Summaries of recent talks given at the club will be posted here regularly.

Whilst the talks are of a technical nature, the club membership has a wide range of backgrounds, so the talks are aimed at the layman and don't assume any great technical knowledge.

8th February 2006

Russ G4SAQ gave us a talk about programming PICs, starting with original ideas for programming early microcomputers, such as the Acorn Atom, then dealing with the basics of PICs themselves and moving on to talk about the essentials of programming the 16F84 device itself.

His initial examples included demonstrations for a simple function such as a traffic light sequence, and he rounded off the presentation with a Navtex decoder which produced an output on a LCD display. In between, Russ discussed various uses of these devices, some related to his ocean sailing interests, such as monitoring drinking water levels and other essential parameters whilst aboard.

For the Navtex demonstration he provided a data tape containing a weather forecast, which the decoder ably translated into plain text on the LCD screen.

The talk was well-received by the members, and may itself lead to a resurgence of interest in these devices within the club.

The evening was concluded by a presentation by Jim M1JJN and Pete G8TXK on the re-located and enhanced F&DARC website, coupled with an appeal for articles and contributions from the Club members.

de Steve G7HEP

22nd February 2006

Full write-up to follow

Resources:

• Seetrax Ranger2 Schematic capture and PCB layout software

12th July 2006

Paul Hawkins presented the talk he gave to the QRP Convention titled "H.F. Telecommunications - What Happened Between Poldhu And Telstar".

The PowerPoint slides were converted to web pages by Jim M1JJN and are available here.

24th September 2008

Impedence Matching

On Wednesday 24^th September Andrew G0AMS gave an interesting PowerPoint talk on Impedance Matching.

If you would like to download this presentation click here.