The afternoon began with our chairman, Rob / ZS1SA, calling us to order. He gave us a report on the recent committee meeting of 21 September, and the various forthcoming events with our club will be involved:
- The club has disposed of its old trailer by selling it to one of our members. The trailer had been sitting unused for several years and was accumulating fines for unpaid vehicle registration fees;
- On the weekend of 17/18 October, the CTARC will run a JOTA station for the Bergvliet Scouts and Guides. Noel / ZS1FW is driving this project;
- Our Saturday 24 October monthly meeting will be the screening of the video of a DX-pedition to Chatham Island, kind courtesy of Barry / ZS1FJ via Paul / ZS1S;
- We also plan to operate ZS1CT during the forthcoming Field Day exercise;
- Our final monthly meeting of the year will be on Saturday 28 November, which will be the CTARC End-of-Year function;
- Next year, the CTARC celebrates its 70th anniversary. We eagerly await members' input and suggestions on how to commemorate this auspicious milestone.
In addition to this, Rob mentioned our club had recently been featured in an article in the Southern Suburbs Tatler newspaper. (See that article here)
We then proceeded with the main event of the afternoon. John / ZS1AGH gave us a fascinating lecture on Decibels - what they are, and how they apply to amateur radio. His talk was illustrated with a PowerPoint lecture, which may be downloaded here.
Those CTARC members with grey hair had to scratch our heads (and watch what hair we have left turn even greyer) at the complexity of it all, having last had exposure to such mental calisthenics when at technical college or university (many years ago...)! At the time, John made it all appear so clear and simple!
John also showed us the tools of the pre-calculator epoch - logarithm tables and a slide rule. They may appear cumbersome to us now, but in experienced and adept hands they were tools of great productivity before cheap digital calculators became widely available.
Hans-Jurgen / ZS1HJH brought along a very useful card published by the German Funkamateur club, of a comparison between decibel values, Voltage and Power levels, and S-Units. He very kindly allowed us to make it available, so you can download it as a PDF file here.
Afterwards we broke for the usual natter over coffee and biscuits. All in all, another great CTARC meeting. We look forward to the forthcoming JOTA field station and October meeting.
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| Rob / ZS1SA opens the meeting and discusses forthcoming events |
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| John / ZS1AGH begins his lecture |
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| A series of calculations on a loooong sheet of paper! |
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| John's lecture was ably illustrated by a Powerpoint show |
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| The meeting was reasonably well attended, in spite of cold weather |
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| Hans-Jurgen and Paul in discussion |
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| Tea and biscuits and chewing the rag after the meeting |