CAKE April 2

CAKE session on April 2

Gary K6PDL mentioned the recent presentation at the Club meeting was on the Amateur  Radio Emergency Digital Network. This is a wide area mesh network using low cost 2 and 5 GHz equipment.  It is something that has been a long time coming and well worth looking at the AREDN site.  Thanks Gary

Good to see you again John N5HPB and thanks for joining the club.  John has more 3-D printed projects in the pipe line and I am sure he would like to hear other project ideas.  Eric  KK6IZY followed up on his topic of carbon -mon-oxide detection by showing a unit he has purchased called FireAngel. It has some very neat safety features. Eric plans to install one in his RV. Heads up Fred KJ6OOV

Peter AB6WM mentioned he has a rather large variable capacitor designed for tuning magnetic loops. Take a look at this and much other fun stuff on Peters’ web site VE3SUN.com.   Peter develops web pages by actually writing HTML code (long time since I tried that!) We reminisced about slide rules and Peter said he would like to find a cylindrical one. Ron plans to scan some 35mm slides and is interested in finding a suitable scanner.

Tablets are very much in evidence, and use, during our CAKE sessions these days. Eric, Peter and Gary were discussing their pros and cons. Drop protection was high on the list of desirable features. Eric has a GPS disciplined clock in his and I asked him what the current time was. My12 year-old, $35, Timex was 10 seconds off. Call me a Luddite if you wish Glen!

HVVGlen showed a home brew design for a rotatable 40m dipole for portable use. It uses a pair of telescopic whips that extend to 17 ft and can be compressed to operate on higher freq bands. I understand Harbor freight has some attractive poles.

I think it might have been Glen who mentioned that HPSDR software is available for the raspberry pi more details will be welcome.

Ron W6WO admitted he had incorrectly calculated the pulse width of the letter E in CW at 60WPM to be 10ms in duration. This differs from the ARRL cw tests which show 20ms.  The 50 symbols for the standard word PARIS was not in dispute but deriving this from the rules isn’t obvious.  Later Phil W6PK mentioned that the April1990 issue of QEX had an article on the topic which introduced the term “units”. Used as an alternative to the fundamental unit of “symbols” it seems redundant and evidently has not been widely adopted.  This subject surfaced when examining the relevance of latency usually associated with DSP. We are asking high end operators to weigh in on what amount of latency is required.

Ron said he will attend the next Board meeting to report the status of plans for our centennial celebration. This will be his last CAKE session until returning in August. Maintain these sessions as you wish, have a fine summer and stay in touch

73 Ron W6WO        PS keep your SCCARC membership current