SJ2W Contest Station

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!