Speaker
November 26, 2024: John Armstrong, KF6GG: Excel is your friend
PLEASE NOTE: Our November 2024 monthly general meeting is ZOOM-ONLY as our regular Kaiser Meeting Room is not available to us this month. If you are a member of our Group at groups.io, look for an invitation email via that Group. Or you can contact aa6qi (at) arrl (dot) net for more info.
This month’s guest speaker will be our own John Armstrong KF6GG (our Vice-president) who will provide a joy ride through the skill ‘needs’ of a ham radio enthusiast interested in understanding his equipment – using the power of the Excel spreadsheet. The goal of the presentation is to inspire you to hone your ham radio skills using your own computer, and your imagination, while avoiding tedious error-prone hand calculations. John maintains that in ham radio, “Excel is your friend”. It is a relatively easy platform to master and permits non-programmers to quickly evaluate, graph, and catalog designs. Hundreds of calculations can be performed quickly, either singly or repetitively, without calculation errors.
In his presentation, John will present examples of his own Excel sheets, which he used for receiver design, impedance matching calculations, reflection coefficient conversions, Smith chart analysis, VSWR to return loss and power loss conversions, coil winding calculations, antenna design, parabolic reflector design, SDR and FIR filter design, multipath calculations, and more. All these Excel examples were built from scratch – as needed. It’s amazing how a few minutes of calculation with Excel can generate confidence. Excel has proven to be platform independent – programs developed in the 1990s still run on 2024 computers.
John T. Armstrong, KF6GG, has been licensed since 1961, when he got his Novice ticket WV2VHK. In the course of the past 60 years, he has maintained an active interest in ham radio and is a Life Member or the ARRL. John has held several officer positions in both the San Gabriel Valley Section of the IEEE and the LA County Council of the IEEE. He has enjoyed a long career in microelectronics and RF communication.