PC Group

The group discusses all aspects of Personal Computing, and organises presentations of interest to members. Other topics of interest are also presented.
Meetings are held at Newdigate Village Hall, Kingsland, Newdigate, RH5 5DB (OS Ref TQ195422) and are normally on the THIRD Wednesday of the month. Our original web site contains some old Newsletters and more information. Some pictures of a meeting can be found on the Gallery page. Visitors are welcome to our meetings.

Membership

Membership is currently £9 a year. For people wishing to receive the newsletter by post rather than email there is an extra fee of £8.
The Application form (PDF) can be downloaded here.

Newsletters from current and past years can be found here.

Current programme

DATE	SUBJECT	PRESENTER
2012
March 21	The CPU The beating heart of the computer	Seb Welford
April 18	AGM and open forum	The Committee
May 16	Ladies Lunch	The Committee
June 20	TBA	TBA

Past programme

DATE	SUBJECT	PRESENTER
2012
February 15	Making Presentations and using PowerPoint	Brian Arthur
January 18	Web Site Creation	Jan Spencer
2011
November 16	Spreadsheets (continued) Chris showed us more things that can be done with spreadsheets, especially using Office 2010.	Chris Rosenberg
October 19	Network Encryption	Guy Meakin
September 21	Photon to JPEG The talk followed the path of the subject information arriving as visible light at a camera lens to its ultimate destination stored as a compressed image file. The stages of processing was described in terms of the various technologies employed and the underlying physics and mathematics.	Chris Rosenberg
July 20	Spreadsheets Seb discussed the basics of spreadsheets and what they can be used for. He used examples and showed how to avoid basic errors. David then demonstrated a spreadsheet that displayed the polar diagram of a radio transmitter using information downloaded from the Ofcom web site.	Seb Welford and others
June 15	Gimp (Graphics in Linux) This is a pixel based image manipulation programme similar to Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photo-Paint. Don described his limited experience of using Gimp during the past year and showed what he has managed to do achieve in the form of before and after results from several photographs. Don followed this by demonstrating how the various results were obtained.	Don Andrews
May 18	Ladies Lunch with talk on New Zealand The meeting was in the Six Bells pub.	Tony Barnes
April 20	AGM & Open Forum Click here for the Chairmans report Click here for the AGM agenda. Click here for the minutes of the 2010 AGM	The Committee
March 16	Tables in Word, Excel & Access	Leslie Haddow
February 16	Computer Communication by Numbers An exploratory and explanatory walk through the world of DHCP, MAC addresses, Ethernet frames, ports and all those other things you keep hearing about but haven't a clue what they mean.	Chris Rosenberg
January 19	Digital Terrestrial Television This presentation looked at the technology and network behind digital terrestrial television. This included an overview of the MPEG compression and COFDM modulation techniques as well as a description of the network itself. It concluded by giving a glimpse of some of the significant challenges involved in digital switchover, which started in Cumbria in October 2007 and is due to complete in 2012. Keith joined the transmission division of the BBC as a Technical Operator in 1973. Following a five year spell in Operations and Maintenance he transferred to the projects division, where he has effectively remained ever since, progressing to his current role of Principal Technologist. Arqiva is the ultimate result of past privatisations of the transmission divisions of the BBC and IBA. Keith has worked in many fields, specialising particularly in digital technology. Having played a significant role in the development of the UK DAB transmitter network he went on to act as the Technical Manager for his company’s roll-out of the UK DTT network in 1998. He subsequently acted as the Technical Manager for the re-launch of the UK digital TV network as Freeview. Keith represents Arqiva on many industry bodies, in particular the UK DTG and DVB.	Keith Hayler, CEng MIET, Principal Technologist, Arqiva Warwick, UK