talk “Height Matters” by Mike Naylor G4CDF, 22nd February 2018 8:00pm

Height Matters – by Mike Naylor G4CDF on Thursday 22nd February 2018 at 8:00 PM – 10:30 PM Woodford Park Leisure Centre, Haddon Dr, Woodley, Reading RG5 4LY

During a recent shack tidy Mike G4CDF encountered many QSL cards from his student days. On looking though them Mike was surprised by what was achieved (mainly VHF/UHF I believe) using the presumably modest station set up at the time. This lead him to thinking about how the location it’s associated attributes affected communications.

No doubt with a splash of reminiscence and a good helping of nostalgia, this should be a very interesting talk, and I am sure we will all learn something including some details on to build a station that can regularly communicate over distances of several hundred kilometres, the effects of antenna size and height, and the effect of local terrain, power level and local noise levels.

We look forward to seeing you there.

[New year’s resolution diet busting refreshments will be served – G4RDC]

73

Simon, M0ZSU, RADARC

meeting Thursday 8th February: Noel Matthews‏ G8GTZ : The Portsdown Digital Amateur Television Project

On Thursday 8th February, we welcome back “Professional radio amateur” Noel Matthews‏ G8GTZ to tell us all about the Portsdown Digital Amateur Television project. You may recall his last talk on cubesats where they used magnets to orient the craft in orbit…we all liked that.

Venue: Woodford Park Leisure Centre, Haddon Drive, Woodley, RG5 4LY
Time: 8pm

So…continuing the theme of elegant engineering:

“The Portsdown DATV project provides an easy way to “get on air” with Digital ATV at relatively low cost. The Portsdown system enables amateur radio operators with little or no knowledge of Digital ATV to construct the hardware elements, load and configure the software and use the system to send live Digital ATV signals across town on their existing aerials. It includes the new Reduced Bandwidth modes and the ability to transmit to local repeaters using the more traditional 2 and 4 Msymbol DATV modes. Frequency coverage of 71 MHz, 146 MHz, 437 MHz and 23cms bands.”

Our very own Simon M0ZSU is also involved with the project and is
building one himself.

Noel and Brian Coleman G4NNS (who also gave us a talk on mapping
galaxies from your back garden using hydrogen line astronomy iirc!!) are now global super-stars after their appearance on Michael Portillo’s “Great British Railway Journeys” BBC programme using the Goonhilly 32m GHY6 dish for 3.4GHz and 5.6GHz EME operation.

Now RADARC members aren’t backward in coming forward so perhaps we can extract some stories about that too. There must be some.

If we ask nicely, Noel might also tell us about his web sdr which I find
very useful for monitoring:

http://farnham-sdr.com/

Tea/coffee/biscuits (many thereof) as usual.

73

John
G4RDC