Crawley Amateur Radio Club

 A quick update on the satellite projects which members have been pursuing at CARC. Many people have been building the homebrew dual-band (2m and 70cm) handheld antennas at the club.  At the same time several members have updated their handheld DMR radios to the Open GD77 firmware which some excellent satellite operation functions built in. It can be a bit of a puzzle as to which satellites are overhead, when.  Also where the satellites are in the sky at any time. I found a really nice piece of software called OscarWatch which makes this really easy. The latest version can be downloaded here  https://github.com/magicbug/OscarWatch-Tracker/releases    Set your location and the satellites you want to work and look for the passes. I recalled that the club has a G5500 Azimuth / Elevation rotator in a box under one of the workbenches.  Alas, it needed a small repair to get the elevation reading properly on the control box, a simple job which took all day! O...

They do say that if you pay for something you're the customer, if it's free then you're the product.  In the case of Windows that actually means your data and your internet activity. Now of course you always read the terms and conditions of usage ?  No?  Ah. So what do Microsoft collect from your Windows 11 PC?   If you believe Microsoft, not much but some things which I'm sure you'd prefer not to share.   Did you know that the CoPilot AI has a feature called Recall which takes periodic snapshots of your desktop to "help with your searches".  Since Q3 2025, you can't easily disable this. Another bugbear of mine is the amount of Bloatware (unwanted applications) that ship with Windows.  If you buy a brand name PC, chances are that the likes of ASUS and HP will bundle software to make you experience better  i.e collect data about you.  All that bloatware is taking up your memory and your disk space you have paid for it but can't use. ...