I worked some tonight on a card which will be essential for the remote control of the station. This boards will talk to the server via USB and has got an openASC bus so it can talk with devices on the bus. It will also control the relays that turn on/off gear in the shack. That way I don’t always need to have everything running, just the server and this small board. So when I want to work remotely there is a software on the local PC that will be used to turn on/off the gear and you’re ready to go. This has also got a timeout, so if it hasn’t received a ping within a certain amount of time, all the equipment are shut off. That way there is no chance for the radio to be stuck in TX if we lose internet or similar.
There is also a picture of the 80m 4-SQ box which I burned up just prior to the contest. When I walked out to the 4-SQ, about 40m from it I could smell the burned electronics and the board was too damaged to be fixed. Luckily I hadn’t given back the 4-SQ box we previously used, which was borrowed from SM2NOG, so I installed that and we were ready for CQWW DX SSB which turned out great. There was some water lying on the board so I suspect that is why it flashed over, and when things start to go bad it burns quite quickly. Next version I will put a better box and also a 15w resistor inside it to keep out moisture.
Hopefully this weekend we can get the 18m tower up and during the evenings I will try to work on the remote control stuff. Would like to be able to listen around a bit during the weekends, even if I can’t rotate antennas yet I can change bands and control direction of the 4-SQs etc. through openASC. Next thing after this will be to start installing the rotator boards into the rotator control boxes.
