Last Month's meeting 30 + members attended the GM at the CSCC location.
Upon entry, members found the chairs set up for the program presentation were already occupied; not with people but with stacks of "QST" magazines. These artifacts escaped from the depths of the club's storage prison where many had languished for decades.
Their hope was to be adopted by the CARA members and provided with a new home or face the incinerator. And adopted they were. Big thanks to Rob Wilson, VE6CCL for organizing the jail break.
The Fun Part: the Program
John Fallows, VE6YE brought along the five foot diameter magnetic loop antenna completed over the summer and recounted its story of construction and testing. Turns out that the magnetic loop design has some very useful characteristics for operation in the midrange HF bands. It's very compact compared to full sized loops, half wave dipoles and beams. More importantly does not need to be mounted high above the ground and has good local noise reduction characteristics when rotated.
To good to be true you say. Well like all things whose performance is based upon the immutable laws of physics, the loop has its limits. It is very narrow in band width and has radiation resistance in the range of miliohms. This translates to a capacitive matching challenge involving very high voltages and the reduction of series resistances in the antenna circuit to the bare minimum.
John accomplished the above in the traditional home-brew fashion of buying available materials locally or from Internet suppliers and building the rest. In this case the building of the variable capacitor involved the use of a 3D printer and a CNC (computer numerical control) machine that he just happened to have home-brewed as well. Use of very inexpensive Arduino based hardware and the writing of the code to enabled the control of its adjustment rounded out the project. If you missed the presentation you can view a video @ play.fallows.ca/wp/category/radio/ham-radio/
The business part of the meeting: Engaging the members
As announced we engaged the attending members in a round table discussion of the Board's directional goals. One chair reserved at each table for a Director and the rest for members. And discuss we did. Directors responded to concerns voiced by the members and where within our directional goals they will be addressed. This part of meeting lasted upward of an hour and the Board will share a compilation of the table notes within the next week, set some priorities and publish the result to the Website and review with the membership at the business part of the October GM.
Since then: Analysis of feedback
Tuesday, Oct 4th the Board met and reviewed Director notes from the above activity. October 18 we will meet again to establish priorities for presentation and discussion at the Oct GM.
Communicating openly and frequently with the membership is one of our foundation goals. The need for that was communicated quite clearly at September's meeting and it was great to get to get it in a 2 way fashion. Let's keep the conversation going.
