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.
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