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.
Tag - amateur radio
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.
It’s been a while since the last post, I’ve been very busy working on our contest station (M0XXT)
M0XXT will be entering CQ WPX M/2 this weekend, head over to www.m0xxt.co.uk for details of the work we’ve been doing on the station.
Some of you may have noticed that the site has now been re-branded to M0YOM. Despite having overdone it slightly the night before at the RSGB convention, it turns out that my full licence exam went succesfuly so i am now M0YOM 🙂
I woke up this morning to find my 35m long doublet all over the back garden, it had been supported by a length of paracord that ran over the top of the house and was secured on the oposite wall. It had been up for about 18 months and it appears that the paracord had finally succomed to UV degredation and snapped. Unfortunatly this takes me of all HF bands except for 80m and running new cord is very difficult as i have to feed it over the roof of the house somehow.
If you are using support lines that are susceptable to UV radiation i would strongly recommend replacing these at least every 12 months to avoid problems like this from occuring.
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)