Lots of progress

I did some EMC testing of the openASC electronics, to make sure that I won’t get any problems when installing the system at the station. This was done in our own lab at work and I did find some small spurs but nothing big. I had the antenna located about 30cm from the electronics while the standard I was comparing to said it should be 10m away, so I had quite some margin 🙂 I was mainly interested to see where they were located and used a IC-735 to listen to them to see what kind of level we were talking about. I could hear the system clock at 14.756 MHz but quite weak and it’s outside the ham band.

On Thursday evening me and the gf went down to the radio QTH with a car filled with stuff. I had the cabinet for the 20m stack with me and all the stuff for the openASC-system, including the oak shelf as well. I spent most of Thursday and Friday cleaning out the shack, removing pretty much all equipment, cleaning it up and adding back the stuff to be used again. I installed the openASC box meanwhile and the driver modules in the basements on Friday and in the evening the system was up and running, with nothing connected however.

On Saturday I moved the coaxes from the shack out to the switch room and hooked up the 6×2 switch, marked up the terminal blocks in the switch room to make it easier to keep track of what is connected where, and hooked up the coaxes to the switch. In the room where the driver modules were located I pealed off the isolation of the 2 60-leaded cables and hooked up the 6×2 switch to one of the driver modules. When this was done I went up and configured the openASC box with the configuration software and it worked UFB. I had the system running for some 30+ hours straight without any noticeable error. However the automatic BCD band decoding did not work, I have some software bug in the internal communication between the two micro-controllers within the openASC control box that I need to fix. There are parts of the code which aren’t finished, but the openASC bus protocol now seem to run very stable *knock on wood*. I also hooked up the beverage switch to a driver module located in the shack and it worked well. So now I am able to select bands manually and also beverages.

Below are some pictures with descriptions

EMC tests

Pictures from the weekend

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