I! -- R.s.v.p. -- !

IF you are here at UCSD, please send me a quick note right away telling me whether or not you will be at the first general meeting of Microship volunteers, here at the lab (EBU room 3325-7) this coming Saturday, Nov 6, from 12 noon until 2 or so. This is primarily oriented to students, but interested faculty or local industry sponsors are invited as well. We need to know right away how many will be here so we can plan refreshments, chairs, etc.

(Thanks to Andrea Woo for picking up the name tags... we'll now be able to identify each other. Also, Sok Sun Chang helped with lab cleanup -- enough that we can have a meeting here and actually be able to *see* each other over the clutter on the benches...)

I should make a few comments on what we'll be doing here at this par^H^H^Hmeeting. While the agenda is open to discussion, some of the specific objectives include getting to know each other, talking about workspace and logistics, and establishing some initial project groups. Hopefully, we will have a couple of faculty representatives on hand to make a few comments about the options available to those of you who are interested in using this project for course credit. And I'll be talking through a couple of specific projects in enough detail to express the kinds of work involved: a few of you have expressed some curiosity about just how such things proceed. As you have seen from these reports, a lot of time goes into phone calls, pondering, discarding approaches that seemed perfect only a day earlier, iteratively closing in on good solutions, and -- oh yes -- sometimes actually BUILDING something.

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In other news, I have a couple of sponsor updates. First, Univenture (Dublin, OH) has agreed to send us all the CD packaging sleeves we'll ever need -- they have a new model of archival quality. Let me know if you want to see these sometime -- they allow much higher density CD stowage than do traditional jewel boxes. About 7 times the number of disks can occupy the space required by the original method... a critical consideration on a boat!

Also, I'm very pleased to report an offer of support from Microchip Technology (Chandler, AZ). They donated some microprocessors and a PIC programmer to the BEHEMOTH project, and now pledge whatever support we need to do all the low-level controllers and their communication network, including development systems and emulators. I'll keep you posted as this develops... these PIC chips are extremely low power, fast, and flexible. They come with lots of on-chip I/O (including A/D on the new models), simple multidrop network hooks, and internal EEPROM.

Literature Received

Multihulls Magazine, July/August 93 (they're a little slow). Always a good browse for multihull-specific info, a bit downscale and funky, but to the point and enthusiastic. A nice counterpoint to glossy yachting magazines.

QST, Nov 93. This is the ARRL ham radio magazine, and is a good resource of ads and technical articles. This particular issue has a full-line catalog from MFJ, one of our sponsors. I'll be contacting him soon with a wish list... including a multi-band vertical antenna and a couple of single-band QRP CW rigs as backups to the main HF comm system.