To

Phillip Brooks, G4NZQ
Charlie Morrison, GI4FUE

Dear Sirs,

I am writing on behalf of the Crawley Amateur Radio Club. You are a candidates for election to the RSGB Board. We have read your statement in RadCom, but we have a number of questions that we wish to put to you to factor into our decision making before voting in the Board Election.

To make this an open process I have posted the questions on the CARC Blog (carconline.blogspot.com), and have requested that Southgate ARC (http://www.southgatearc.org/) post them on their Newswire service. We would request that you copy your answers to those two web services, or that you request that I do so on your behalf.

1) Many elements of the RSGB decision making process take place behind closed doors with little effort to consult with members before a final decision is made. In this modern, Internet connected era, there are many ways to solicit wider input from the community. If (re)elected what steps will you take to ensure that the RSGB Board gathers wider input as part of its decision making process?

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I have mentioned to a few people that I built the LMS Impedance Bridge published in both QEX and QST by Dr George R. Steber, WB9LVI. The design can be found at http://wb6dhw.com/RLC_Meter/N%20LMS%20Impedance%20Bridge.pdf . Indeed I thought that I had written it up for the CARC blog, but when I went to look for it I remembered that I had delayed writing it up because I got bogged down trying to compare the results of a number of LCR meters at the G3YSX QTH.

The thing that brought this to the top of my mind, was the following design by Rik Strobbe ON7YD http://www.rcl-meter.strobbe.eu/index.html which shows an even simpler version using just two resistors and two capacitors. Rik, ON7YDD is well know for his excellent technical work on LF communications. The only downside with Rik’s design, in common with all of these instruments, is that it requires an audio card with line in (i.e. with stereo in), and unfortunately these are only to be found on desktop machines or on the more expensive USB sound “cards”.

I have not tried the ON7YD version of the LCR bridge, though I expect that I will, if anyone does build one I would be interested in reports on its performance.

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