Crawley Amateur Radio Club

For our May 2026 monthly presentation we were given a talk on FPGAs by Zander M1YAP.  For those unable to attend the presentation we used Claude AI to make the following notes: Zander M1YAP recently presented an introduction to Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and VHDL to our club, demystifying these reconfigurable digital devices with clear explanations and liv demonstrations on a Xilinx Spartan 701 evaluation board. The presentation began by explaining where FPGAs fit in the landscape of custom logic devices. FPGAs can be reprogrammed on the fly. This makes them ideal for prototyping, education, and applications where flexibility matters more than squeezing every bit of efficiency. Zander then covered the fundamental building blocks of an FPGA: lookup tables (LUTs) and flip-flops arranged into configurable logic blocks, all connected by a programmable routing fabric. He explained how these simple elements combine to implement any digital circuit. Highlighted dedicated ...

On Sunday 10th May members of Crawley Amateur Radio Club headed off to Ifield Water Mill to take part in the annual Mills on the Air event. We used an inverted V dipole for the 40m band. Initially we used a Hermes Lite 2 and 150w amplifier, later on in the day we used a Yaesu FT-710. In previous years we had needed our sun cream, but this year we were not so fortunate, and were very grateful for the gazebo that club member Charlie provided.  Propagation conditions were poor, but we managed over 50 QSOs across England, and most of Western Europe. We were lucky enough to have QSOs with 10 other clubs taking part in the event. GB2NW - Nutley Windmill, East Sussex GB6GEM - Gainsford End Tower Windmill, Essex GB0CWM - Cogglesford Watermill, Lincolnshire GB6CW - Cromer Windmill, Norfolk GB0BW - Bourn Windmill, Cambridgeshire GB1HCM - Heron Corn Mill, Morecambe GB5HW - Heage Windmill, Derbyshire GB5WEM - Wind Energy Museum & Thurne Mill GB6HWM - Herne Windmill, East Kent GB2RRS -...

  Club member Ted (G7OBF), explains the process of updating the NanoVNA. I have never flashed any thing before so was worried about breaking the VNA. I succeeded, and here are the resources and my approach I used. Apparently the main STM program “STM32Cubeprg” will flash from a .bin file but this requires you to entered the start address and that was beyond me, whilst the .dfl file has all the info needed. I chose the .dfu file method The RSGB NanoVNA book outlines the procedure and I found this Wiki more helpful as it has added details https://groups.io/g/nanovna-users/wiki The best YouTube video I found was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcXzITPPTyA Use your browser to download “DFuSE Demo” tool. I choose an English language site as some of the info on the developers site is in Chinese! My Windows failed to select the correct driver for this program, its in file called sttube.inf. To install the driver follow this link for instructions https://groups.io/g/nanovna-users/files/Mis...