Not much more work was done in the shack except some finishing touches on the remote. I fixed so that the RX switch for the TS480 works and should make it impossible to transmit on the RX antennas and it seem to work well. The plan was also to get the 60m tower rotatable but weather did not allow it with rain mixed with snow during a couple of days.
Lots of work to be done and I will try hard not to go too fast and make a mess of all wires again.
The radio shack has gotten so messy lately, that it felt like it was time to redo everything properly. Now when all equipment pretty much is the same regardless of contest it is easier to put cables etc more permanent. Priority #1 will be getting the remote up and running and the rest will have to take as long as it takes before everything is working to 100%. Position #1 and #2 (SO2R position) will be done when I have the support op fixed which will be a high priority now so its done before WPX SSB.
SM2XJP helped me all day so it went pretty well and part of the stuff is now done but still lots more to be done.
I also went out to remove some snow which had stuck to some guy wires.
I have been playing around getting rotators to be controlled by the openASC system. Right now I have installed it on two antennas (5el 15m, 5el 20m) and hopefully before the Christmas break is over I will have it installed also on the 60m tower and the 10m stack. I rotate it either with the openASC box or with the openASC Controller software which communicates with the box over ethernet and can be used remotely. By just selecting which antenna I wish to rotate and clicking in the map the rotation of the antenna(s) start.
openASC Controller run in Windows 7
openASC Controllerr run in Linux
Here are some winter pictures,
I’ve been in the mood for building so I built a W7IUV preamp that I am going to test if it works better than the MMIC version I tried earlier. That one works too but I am hoping to get even better IMD performance from this one, we will see.
I also assembled two rotator boards for the openASC system. I intend to get the rotating working via the openASC system during the Christmas break which would make remote operating even more fun! Now I have four boards so I can convert all rotators and the easiest one is the alfa spid where I only needed to mount the bus interface, uC and the RS232 converter since its a serial controllable rotator. The other ones are the 3-phase motor of the 60m tower (24v relays), the YAESU G-1000SDX and an old EMOTATOR 1103MMX where I will just interface it against the push buttons and the potentiometer for indication. SM0SVX has written a great piece of software for the rotor control @SK3W and I have written the interface so it works against my hardware as well now.
I have decided to remove the pulse sensor on the 60m tower and put a 3-turn 1k potentiometer that I got from SM2O. This will make the system more safe even if the rotator board has got a big super cap which makes it possible to save the current position before turning off. However it can still lose pulses because of RF etc, so the non-volatile behavior of the pot will be more reliable.
