Tag Archives: rLab

Magnetic loop antennas and fundamental antenna questions – Prof. Mike Underhill G3LHZ

Folks,

At our next meeting we welcome Prof. Mike Underhill G3LHZ to tell us all about magnetic loop transmitting antennas including the latest research. He will bring a selection of loops.

Venue: Woodford Park, Woodley, 8pm as usual, Thursday 27th April.

Further, Mike will address fundamental questions about antennas in
general.

Mag loops offer interesting possibilities where space is at a premium –
a number of them we are hoping will fit in the tea room at Woodford
Park.

Also, if extreme volts and amps are your bag – this is definitely one
for you. I’m no expert (Rael is, M0RTP) but the tuning caps need to be
specially designed to handle the high voltages (often involving vacuums) and the loops themselves need low resistance.

Tuning of said caps offers challenges for micro controller/computer auto tuning so there’s something for Arduino/Raspberry Pi enthusiasts etc. – indeed Rael has done quite a bit of work here.

Refreshments to be served as usual.

Looking forward to seeing you on Thursday.

Many thanks to Rael, our own mag loop exponent, for helping organise this meeting.

cheers

John
G4RDC

Reading Hackspace

Reading Hackspace Visit

On Wednesday the 23rd of November a group of members from RADARC headed down to find out more about the Reading Hackspace, known as “rLab”.

Upon arrival at the small industrial area in the centre of Reading, a small unit with nothing more than a door and a couple of windows sits quietly in the otherwise dead industrial area.

It is 8pm and we approach the door to be greeted by a member of rLab. They led us up the stairs and told us that there would be someone around to give us a tour. My first thoughts… WOW…

The first room we came to was the electronics and desk area. People are sat working all around the room on everything from CAD designs and soldering through to Hard disk recovery and coding. We instantly started asking questions and getting to know a little bit about the group.

Once someone became available we were led around the building being shown all of the awesome equipment, tools and machinery they have there. It was one hell of an eye opener to see that this whole community runs off membership donations and kindness. There were lathes, laser cutters, 3D printers and much more.

We then went back upstairs to the electronics/workbench area and “mingled”. There were some people playing around with LED light boards, clocks, Raspberry Pi’s, Arduino’s, Hard disks, coding on (very) old hardware and much more. We got a demo of the laser cutter which was seriously cool too!

All in all it was a very nice evening and we all look forward to getting to know the hackspace community. We hope that they will also come to find out more about RADARC in the near future. As always, everyone is welcome!

Stay tuned for more posts about our events in the future!

Written by James 2E0JPM