Category Archives: openASC - Page 7

Some milling done

Posted by sm2wmv on September 2, 2011 Comments Off

Today I milled bigger holes in two type of gears which will be used to give a 2:1 ratio between a stepper motor and an 10-turn pot, which will give us an absolute position of the capacitors. This will be used to convert one of our manual tuned amps to an preset tuned one. Hopefully if I get this working before CQWW SSB it will solve our amplifier problem since I can use it on most bands thus freeing up the 4CX1500B amp to be used on the 2nd radio. The idea is that the double axle stepper motor will be put in “series” with the capacitor axle. So the idea is to tune the amp as usual, and when you have it at maximum output power we just press save and it saves the position for the current band and segment. That way the openASC box can inform the amp of which band its currently on and the amp will tune to that position. I will make a real maneuver box for it in the future, similar to the openASC but for amps. However this is a lot of work and will be built in the future, now I want to get the amp functional.

The 2x4CX1500B amp project will continue when the outdoor work at SJ2W has stopped because of snow, so hopefully I can finish that amp up this winter too.

The excavator will probably dig some holes at the QTH this weekend, stay tuned!

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Cleaing up the antenna switching

Posted by sm2wmv on August 5, 2011 1 comment

Today I first did work some on making it possible to use the fireplace in the basement again. Its half done, so I will try to finish it up tomorrow.

SM2LIY did move the 2 half squares for 30m to another position and has put the cables into the antenna switch room. A 6×1 box has been mounted so that we can hook up WARC antennas and route them to the main antenna switch system, so that no manual switching will be needed and the amplifiers can be used on them.

SM2XLL said yesterday that we should mount the stairs up to the switch room again since it has been removed since two years back. So today he showed up and we mounted the stairs again and also brought me some tape he bought in town. Its funny how a job which has been put on hold for 2 years gets done in 20 minutes, why not just do it at once?

I decided to do something I have been thinking of for a while since its been raining today, and that was to redo all the antenna switching so that its more tidy with cable ladders and proper accessories to mount cables easily. I also added the 2nd 6×2 switch which makes it possible for us to have four radios hooked up so that they can access all antennas plus I added a power splitter for 10m. Its only half finished though, I hope to finish it all up tomorrow except the power splitters for 80/160m which still need to be built. Do you have any 7/16″ females for chassie mounting which you don’t use? Then I need some of them to finish up the switch system.

Now me and SM2LIY will try the sauna since we now have the SM0W hinges mounted and ST0R in the log on the low bands 🙂

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Remote control card built

Posted by sm2wmv on April 16, 2011 Comments Off

Today I assembled a card which will be used to do some different things in the shack. It has got a USB port which is used to communicate with the server, and it has got an openASC bus as well which makes it possible to talk with different units on the bus, or different units to talk with the remote card. It is used together with the box I previously posted about with the 10 pcs of switches, mainly used to turn on/off different gear at the radio station. It can be done either through the server (remotely) or locally. The plan is also that it will have a timer which times out if for example we lose the Internet connection and will then automatically turn off all the gear.

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Rotator control from openASC

Posted by sm2wmv on March 1, 2011 Comments Off

I’ve done some more work on the openASC project. A lot of new software has been written, including band interlock, some small bug fixes, more error handling, better support for rotators and more stuff that I don’t remember. I also intend to fix the rotation so that it works properly, so I took with me an KR-400 rotator that SE2T donated and modified it by putting in one of my openASC rotator boards. This board is basically just a micro-controller with a bus interface and some relay drivers and analog inputs (also digital inputs for pulse sensing). An external board is also used with relays that act as “digital” fingers pushing the buttons on the box. It is still possible to control the antenna manually if wanted.

When this works I will put rotator boards into all rotators. However the 60m tower need to wait until it has got its end stops, so that a computer bug doesn’t make it rip of all cables etc.