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.

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I’ve been building a bit more on that conversion “kit” for making one of our manual tuned amps automatic (in this case, an 4-1000A amp). The idea is that you already have all meters etc on the amp, grid current, anode current etc. So this box is just a way to tune the amp manually but then save the settings and they get loaded automatically when the box is switched from LOCAL to REMOTE mode by sending commands over the openASC bus. The C1/C2 PAD is to switch in extra C in the Pi-filter. As a first step the openASC box will send the band information and when the amp should be tuned, but later I will make an similar box as the openASC which will show grid current, anode current etc in the shack as well.

I am quite pleased with how the box came out, except the REMOTE ending up too close to the hole.

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I’ve done some coding on the openASC project. I took a KR-400 rotator home with me which SE2T gave me, which I earlier converted to be controlled with an openASC box. Now I’ve written the code to both rotate antennas with preset or manually. I also implemented so that one can configure a rotator board through the USB port of an openASC box. That way we don’t need to physically access the rotator board when configuring it. It seem to work well, both on rotators which are centered north and south. That is now indicated on the display, so that when we manually rotate antennas we have an indicator telling us if we should go over north or south.

Now I will need to build boards for all my rotators and put them in, hopefully I can have the openASC system controlling all rotators @SJ2W before CQWW CW, which means our 4-radio openASC positions are pretty much completed with full control of the whole station from each position.

I will need to write some support for rotators which we don’t control by pushing its buttons with a relay, but those rotators who have built in presets etc and can be communicated with through RS232. The openASC rotator board does support this, I just need to implement some communication protocols. Since I bought an alfa spid I assume that will be the first, but if I implement for example DCU-1 protocol, it should work with most rotators.

I’m also building a 4-SQ box for the 80m 4-SQ array, so that SM2NOG can get his COMTEK box back which I borrowed when the QTH was bought. I will post some pictures of that maybe tomorrow so stay tuned!