On 4/22/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The "Budge" commands apply power power to the rotor in the desired direction for one-half second to cause the rotor to turn slightly in either desired direction. After coasting to a stop, it read back the new rotor direction. The interrogate command caused the ShackMaster to read back the current rotor direction. In addition, it reads back "Right" or "Left" if the rotor is currently turning.
How did the Shackmaster (frankly, it's "before my time"... never seen one, never used one...) handle rotors with brakes? Many of the modern rotor controls that have RS-232 in/out handle this for you with by automatically handling the brake commands internally, and sometimes even a slight nudge the opposite direction of last movement to keep the rotor brake from binding up, and then they allow the antennas to "coast" for a few seconds after movement before applying the brake again. Were the rotors that were controllable by this Shackmaster thing smart enough to do all of that, or did they just tear up their own gear/brake systems over time by slamming the antenna system to a stop at the desired direction? Or were they for much less heavy-duty rotors than that? It seems to me that these newer "intelligent" rotor controllers out there are the ones to shoot for if any controller folks are thinking of adding rotor controls to their repeater controllers. I don't think the serial port command structures change for these features, but you'd want to stay away from rotors without these features if you were building something you hoped would last and survive the weather. Spending a lot of time on cheap rotors without brakes and other features is just ... "maintenance waiting to happen", I would think... We'd never put any kind of a rotor system up at any of our high mountain sites anyway -- the wind would have them either torn up or the antennas "spun" within a couple of months... it'd be a total pain in the backside. So I guess the only way we'd ever even take advantage of such a system would be down at someone's QTH away from the hill, and we'd have to build up RF links and other stuff just to get that to a site, anyway... so I don't think we'll ever go down this path... far too little real utility vs. the installation and maintenance headaches. Not to mention cost. A good rotor runs $600-$1500 these days... without the "smart" control box. Ouch. This discussion is all good information for the guy with a "backyard" repeater, looking to fiddle with the big home station's antennas remotely... but not so useful for our club systems, at least at the moment... unless someone's going to donate a few acres out on the prairie for such a setup... and even then, the plains winds are sometimes worse than the mountains out here... stuff would just get torn up... not to mention lightning... ouch. It all sounds expensive and hard to maintain... mostly... but interesting to talk about. Not sure it's worth the controller manufacturer's time/effort unless there's some pent-up demand for rotor control features somewhere out there, and you guys have an environment that is more hospitable to automated remote base stations... definitely not an easy or fun thing to maintain here! Nate WY0X
