Just a quick update to say that ACOM Director 0.4.0 is now available for download, head over to the dedicated ACOM Director page for details
Category - Projects
Following the initial release of the ACOM Director beta the feedback has been excellent and it appears to have been very well received by the ACOM 2000 user community.
Thank you to everyone who downloaded a copy and tried it out, your bug reports, comments and opinions are invaluable in moving the software forward.
I am now working on the next beta release which i hope to make available soon and will be putting up a dedicated page on my site for ACOM Director, this will contain information on what type of cable is needed to connect to the ACOM 2000 and information on what type of interface is needed to support the remote power on features.
Thanks again to everyone who has tried out the software.
ACOM Director 0.2.0 is now in public beta, anyone is free to try this.
The feature set is limited at the moment while i get the bugs worked out of the main ACOM 2000 communication routines, however i have many features planned.
At the M0XXT/M9X station we use 2 ACOM 2000 Amplifiers, these are excellent amps and importantly they have the capability to be computer controlled. However there is a distinct lack of software that will allow you to control the amplifier from the computer. I believe this is mainly due to the somewhat complex control protocol that ACOM used for the amplifier.
I recently purchased a few LCD displays from ebay, these were labelled up as Hitachi LM038 LCD Modules. There didn’t seem to be much information out there on the internet about how to use these, so I thought i’d put together a quick how to guide for anyone else who may have purcased one of these. In the example i’m using an Arduino (Atmel ATMega328) for speed and ease of use, however the process would be the same for any micro (PIC or AVR).
I’m pleased to say that the 5B4AGN Band Pass filters are now complete, enjoy the photo’s
During the build of the Band Pass Filters it has become obvious that my little miniVNA is just not up to the job. Because of this (after some advice from Bob 5B4AGN) i will be embarking on building one of these
Construction of the band pass filters continued today, progress has been slow recently as i needed some more parts (M3 10mm bolts and some M3 nuts), I also had the problem of finding some appropriate coax to use for the internal connections. As luck would have it i have a couple of barely working Wifi antennas that have some nice long leads of very thin coax, it turns out that the coax is RG-174, perfect for my short internal connections on the BPF’s.
My large 7 segment displays have arrived, these are 2.24″ tall and will be eventually be used in couple of large band readouts for the M0XXT contest station.
They are yellow and of the common anode variety. Should look pretty nice once the project is finished. If anyone knows of a suitable enclosure to hold 3 of these plus associated circuitry please let me know.
For CQ WPX this year i built two sets of high power coax stub filters to allow the M0XXT team to enter as Multi-Single.
These stubs performed reasonably, although there are some improvements i plan on making for the final design to be used in conjunction with the Band Pass Filters already under construction.
Expect a full article on the coax filters soon.
(P.S. Fitting over 80 PL-259’s is not fun)