Hi Nate, It's a road full of potholes.
Yes, repeater controllers can be made to control HF rigs, antenna rotors, weather stations, and all kinds of simplex and duplex phone patches in addition to the existing load of repeaters, remote bases, and links. But it's a real job given the number of incompatible protocols out there -- which, of course, increases each year when the major rigmakers bring out new transceivers. Our 7330 has a second RS-232 port for such things, and we'll be picking and choosing some devices to be compatible with. But jeez. Do you really want to control a complex rig with a lousy DTMF pad and synthesized speech for feedback? What many want is a modern version of the Shackmaster. Why hasn't someone designed a replacement? Because it's one thing to support your favorite HF rig with a homebrew controller but quite another to offer a commercial product that supports many different rigs. Some clubs use PCs as remote consoles and communicate with HF rigs via Ethernet, and that sounds like a really good solution at present. 73, Bob, WA9FBO -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com Sent: Fri, 20 Apr 2007 12:15 PM Subject: Re: [Repeater-Builder] Remote Base Antenna Interesting topic... On 4/20/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:For some reason, none of the repeater controller manufacturers seem to have incorporated any "real" rotator direction control functions in their controllers, even though they support various HF transceivers with control of modes, frequencies, bands, filters, scanning, memories, etc. That's interesting. I did some Googling last night while I was waiting on a customer to finish swapping a board during a maintenance window, and I see that there's a couple of standards for Serial control/reading of rotor controls, and the HyGain protocol seems to be the most popular. Would you agree? I haven't done anything like that yet. Might be worth putting the protocol on the "wish lists" of the controller manufacturers that have serial ports... <snippage...> If they could do it back in the 1980's, it should be able to be done now. An HF Remote Base isn't very useful on the upper HF bands without a directional antenna, and having it fixed in one direction is usually pointing the wrong direction when you need to use it. Seems very "do-able" if the controller has a bi-directional serial port, which many are either already "there" or are going to be soon. Usually the serial port is tasked with being the way "in" for the controller to be programmed... but I bet the firmware folks could come up with interesting hybrid approaches to the re-use of the port for rotor control when desired. There's other ways, but the "plug and pray" these days would seem to be the HyGain serial protocol. (However the HyGain rotor control that does the protocol itself gets crappy reviews everywhere... there appear to be better solutions that use HyGain's protocol.) We should see if any of the controller manufacturer's pop up with comments on the list... I can think of some interesting uses for such a setup on an HF or VHF remote base... and with Auxiliary Station control now legal on VHF... Hmm, interesting ... Nate WY0X ________________________________________________________________________ AOL now offers free email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at AOL.com. =0
