October 4, 2018 Club Meeting
Thursday, October 4, 2018 at 7:00 PM Medford Police Department Community Room, 219 S. Ivy St., Medford, OR
Program: Arduino Essentials, Tom McDermott, N5EG
This program will go over the basics of the low-cost Arduino family of boards, the GUI development environment, and some Amateur Radio applications of Arduino. There will be several demonstrations.
Remember we change meeting locations starting with the October meeting. John Laybourne has secured a new meeting location for RVARC. The first meeting in the new facility will be the October 4th meeting. The new facility can hold about 150 people, has tables and chairs, a ceiling mounted projector, and a coffee pot ! It’s between Holly St. and Ivy St. along the northwest side of 10th Street. There is on-street parking as well as a parking garage nearby. The on-street parking is plentiful, time restrictions expire at 6:00 PM.
Announced in the October 2018 issue of The Repeater.
Meeting Notes
From the November 2018 issue of The Repeater.
RVARC Meeting Minutes, October 4, 2018
Meeting at new club location, Medford PD conference room, on S. Ivy St. near 10th Ave.
7:00 pm Meeting opened by club president Allen Taylor, K7GT with about 23 people in attendance.
Treasurers Report: Club bank balance is $4416.36, and liability insurance needs renewal.
Tom, N5EG, made a motion for allocation of $200 for ARRL club insurance renewal. There were many seconds, and the vote was a unanimous yes.
There was word of Dan Curtis’ continued recovery from a recent stroke, the prognosis was good, and all wished him well.
The club website, W7DTA, was back online after a brute-force password attack succeeded, likely by Ukrainian hackers. The webmaster Todd Carney, K7TFC, has implemented a login rate limiter to help prevent future abuse. The club offered a round of applause to Todd for his effort.
Next month, club elections will be held, so it’s an opportunity for all to see their ideas for the future of the club become reality by running for the office of president, vice-president, treasurer, or secretary.
The first presentation, by Allen Taylor, K7GT, was on his SOTA operations this Summer. Summits On The Air gives hams a chance to get out to scenic mountain peaks, setup portable antennas and run battery-operated transceivers, in all kinds of weather. There is an awards system, with points given according to difficulty and season. You can be an ‘activator’ on a peak or a ‘chaser’ at the shack or out with a portable. Contacts are logged in the SOTA database so you can keep track of your contacts and points. It takes 4 contacts to activate a peak. There is a cell-phone app (SOTA Spotter) to allow you to log contacts in real-time to the sotawatch2 database. ( see www.sota.org.uk/Joining-In/SOTA-SMS-Format )
Some of the peaks Allen worked this year were:
- Upper Table Rock (W7O/CS-157)
- Mt. Ashland (W7O/CS-019)
- McDonald Peak (W7O/CS-030)
- Condrey Mountain (W6/NW-073).
An Elecraft KX3 was used on 40M, 30M, and 20M bands and, if I heard correctly, up to 150 contacts-per-hour rate could be had on 20M. Allen also mentioned that Summit-to-Summit (S2S) can be fun, with a little pre-arrangement to co-ordinate contact attempt times with the other ‘summitors’. (see www.sota.org.uk, www.sotamaps.org, www.sotawatch.org, and www.pnwsota.org for more info ) http://www.mbars.club/static/files/SOTA_Talk_M0NOM_Mountains_with_Radios.pdf has an overview of SOTA )
7:30 pm Break for snacks
8:00 pm Second presentation by Tom McDermott, N5EG, on uses for Arduino-family devices in ham radio.
The Arduino family of 8-bit microprocessor boards have a (roughly) standardized I/O and mechanical layout, allowing for interchangeable plug-in adapter boards to be used. They use 5 volt DC power to the IC’s and have a built-in voltage regulator to utilize 7 to 12 volt DC power sources. There is a GUI software development system (IDE) using a C/C++ language subset. That IDE has also been extended for many other microprocessor devices and many peripheral libraries have been developed for our easy use.
Tom was active with TAPR in developing a high-accuracy time-stamping peripheral board for the Mega2560-type Arduino. Using some Texas Instruments counter/timer ICs, they achieved a 55 picosecond time-resolution, this board can be used for testing drift of high-stability oscillators.
To illustrate what the ham can do with Arduinos, there was a demonstration of an antenna switching board using the Arduino Uno, a color LCD display with touchscreen, and a homebrew relay board. Those relays activated the RF-relays via AC or DC over a cable, so the Arduino controller could be near the computer, and the RF switchbox could be where it needs to be. Also, Tom showed a stepper-motor driven star tracker platform for photography use. Using a stepper motor-driver peripheral board, an Uno was easily programmed to drive the stepper to make the camera-mount follow the earth’s rotation and allow for star photos that didn’t trail.
John, KF7UMK, mentioned that there are various new Arduino-compatible boards that are using 32-bit processors and, for some projects, those are also cost-effective.
9:00 pm Meeting Adjourned.
