Monthly Archives: May 2015

Ham Radio

G-1000DXC Rotator Interface

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Ordered a Yaesu G-1000DXC from Sands Marine, the service received was second to none and I would recommend them, unfortunately the rotator doesn’t come with the necessary connections, these were bought from Waters & Stanton.

Rotor cable will be bought from Westlake Electronics when I know the required length.

I want to interface the rotator with Ham Radio Deluxe, the Yaesu interface box is simply stupid money at £510!!, I bought a kit from Easy Rotor Control for  total cost of £64 including 6 pin DIN plug which will perform exactly the same function (Interface on its own is £57).

The kit was built in a couple of hours and worked immediately, the documentation comes on a CD and is brilliant.

SAM_5336 (Medium)

 

SAM_5344 (Medium)

I had an enclosure lying about which was an ideal fit fro the pcb, the front panel has a USB connection for the PC, a DC input which will take 13.8v so it can be fed directly from the PSU feeding the transceiver and the lead which goes to the rotators controller.

The CD which comes with the kit has a test and calibration software program which allows functional testing and saving of settings.

The interface is all working and I’ve posted a YouTube Video of it controlling a rotator via commands sent from Ham Radio Deluxe.

Weather Site

Second Hard Drive Added to Weather PC

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Added a 1Tb secondary hard drive to the weather PC, this was bought from dabs.com and was delivered within a few days, I’ve always had excellent service from dabs.

The Dell Precision 490 has a spare bay for a hard drive but it needs a special caddy, these are less than £5 from Charles Computers on Ebay.

The fitting is really straightforward as all the required cables are pre-installed, once plugged up, the PC is turned on and as soon as the Dell logo is shown, pressing F2 enters the BIOS, here the SATA drive is enabled, before rebooting.

I’m using Acronis True Image 2015 and using the Tools>>Clone Disk option made the secondary drive bootable and also this will be where backups are stored.

I have set Acronis to generate ‘Version Chains’ it does this by making a full backup first and then differential backups, every fifth backup is a full one and the chain starts again, any version older than six months is deleted.

The Version chain is ran three times a week to the secondary drive with a full backup to an external drive being done weekly.

Weather Site

Changed Weather PC

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Over the past few weeks the reliability of my dedicated weather PC was getting worse, probably due to the number of concurrent applications running and the fact that it is never switched off.

I decided to get a more ‘gruntier’ one, not sure if that’s the correct word, not only to  server my weather site  but become my main PC, therefore a number of radio related applications needed installing as well.

I used GNG computers in Huntingdon who I have used a number of times before and have never been disappointed on cost, quality or speed of delivery.

PC

The PC is a Dell Precision 490 and has duel Xeon 3Ghz 2 core processors, 8Gb of RAM and two hard drives (well the second one will be fitted soon) 650Gb and 1Tb, the 1Tb will be a mirror of the main drive and have the backups on it.

The process to transfer the weather programs was a nightmare as a number of them were licensed to one PC, moving the programs meant transferring licenses, so I’ll bore you with the programs I transferred or installed: –

Orbitron, WSPR, Dl-Digi,Fl-Digi, Ham Radio Deluxe, HDSDR, MMSSTX, DX Atlas, Echolink, Raidar, CCleaner, Notepad++, Filezilla, Google earth, Microsoft Office, Kaspersky, Teamviewer, Livezilla, Diffmerge, The Owl, VXM remote, Arduino, Z-Zip, LifeCam, Olympus digital camera, Dropbox, Google Docs, E-mail, Weather Display, Nexstorm, Startwatch, StormvueNGX, Sentry, Sebectec, Wxsim, Wxmate, WASP2, Discharge, Acronis 2015, System Scheduler, WDL configurator, Microsoft Expression, Strikestar EU, Skype, Visio and Image resizer!

I must say that it is blisteringly fast and I can comfortably now do more than one thing at once, which is quite an achievement for a bloke.

Update

Replaced PC with Meteobridge Pro, blog on that HERE.