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.

15th November 2006

On Wednesday 15^th November FDARC held a debate on the following motion:

“This house believes that contests should be severely restricted or a series of much tighter controls should be introduced to ensure the already very busy HF bands are more available to all.”

In his opening statement, Pete argued that, in his view, there were too many contests, and that there was a tendency to take over entire HF bands at a time. This often made it very difficult, or impossible, to find a free frequency on which to hold “normal” contacts. Pete cited the difficulties experienced on the recent JOTA weekend, where amateurs operating in a German contest significantly reduced the space available for JOTA contacts. Pete felt that the number of contests should be restricted to allow non-contesting amateurs the opportunity to enjoy the use of the bands without being almost forced off the bands by the lack of space. In particular Pete believed that dates used for specific non-contest events, like JOTA, should be designated “contest free”. Pete also said that the situation would be eased if contests were more rigorously policed, with disqualifications for excessive power, operating outside the band plan (with the addition of “Contest Allowed Here” sections of the plans).

In his response, Mick said that, in his view, most bands would be utterly “dead” without contest operating. Mick cited several examples where, for example, one week a band was, apparently, completely empty, but the next week, the same band was full of stations operating in a contest. One example that Mick gave was “2m Activity Tuesdays”. Mick pointed out that contest operating is very useful to people who want to work lots of stations quickly, and also to those who were trying to achieve various awards. Indeed Mick, said that the very popular IOTA contest was specifically to allow people to gather the required number of contacts to achieve an IOTA award. Further, Mick pointed out that some islands were only active during, or for a short period around, the time of the IOTA contest. Mick agreed with Pete that some contest operating left quite a lot to be desired and that some operators were rather rude to inexperienced operators or those who were not in the contest.

The debate was then thrown open to the floor. The main points raised were:-

• There are some clubs that exist solely for contest operation

• Some people need/don't need competitions

• Several people agreed that better policing could reduce the problem.

• Contests should be specifically be restricted to certain band segments by including them in the band plan and making adherence to the band plan part of the contest rules.

• More contests should have [low] power limits. - How could this be policed?

• Who is going to “police” the contests?

• There are not always SSB and CW contests at the same time – if there is a SSB contest on the band go down to the CW segment and work people on CW.

• A lot of contests are restricted to a subset of the bands available – the WARC bands are NEVER used for contests.

• The current time of the sunspot cycle makes the situation worse by forcing more contesters into the bands that are open – there other bands are not much use because they aren't open!

• Contests are a great way to work countries that are not very active.

• Contests are a great way to accumulate the contacts required for various awards.

• Contest exchanges don't really count as “working” another station – the amount of information communicated is very limited and the standard “5 and 9” signal report is useless.

• One club member operates RTTY contests exclusively and has worked thousands of stations in the last couple of years.

• What about contests being about the first station to 100 contacts? Those stations then closing down to allow the others to continue.

• The hobby is supposed to be about “Communicating”, the “Rag Chew” is much more in the spirit of the hobby than the boiler plate contest exchanges.

After an hour of debate, Pete and Mick summed up their main points, including many that had been raised from the floor.

After reminding those present of the wording of the motion, Graham called for a show of hands for and against the motion.

The results were:-

Graham declared that the motion was carried by 10 votes to 2.