The Crawley Amateur Radio Club (CARC) was formed over 40 years ago and moved into its present premises Hut 18 Tilgate Forest Recreational Centre, in the early 90’s. We are an affiliated club of the RSGB. Membership, currently standing at around 55, ranges from a member in their twenties to several octogenarians. The monthly talks and presentations cater for a diversity of technical backgrounds from absolute beginners to well-qualified professional engineers. Members of note include a past President of the RSGB the late John Graham G3TR, and the late Ron Vaughan G3FRV (now VK6RV), General Manager of the RSGB in the late 60’s. Current members include Stewart Bryant, G3YSX (past President of the RSGB, and currently RSGB Chair), Caspar Pierce (Winner of the RSGB Kenwood trophy), and Eugene Sully G0VIO of Big Brother fame who does much to actively promote interest in radio communications and the Sciences in general. Facilities at the spacious Clubhouse include: A contest-grade radio station...
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 ...