Eric Fort wrote:
I just thought of kind of a neat product for those of us that work sats. Has anyone seen anything similar? I have an ft-817 which has a cat interface and will operate both ssb and fm. Has anyone seen a little box that would adjust the radio frequency for both uplink and downlink while displaying azmuth and elevation data? It seems that it would be handy to have the frequency control take care of itself while providing data as to where I should point the arrow. What do those reading this idea think of it? It would seem to me to be quite useful especially for ssb.
I think it was Mark VandeWettering, KF6KYI, who had a similar idea a few months ago. Last I heard I think he was toying around with the idea of using a Gumstix (http://www.gumstix.com/)device to be the "black box." - There was a reason he didn't pursue it, but I forget why.
This is a easily extensible system that can be hacked up to control doppler and handle basic radio functions. One could probably have a simple system banged out in an afternoon. As it gets more complicated (external display to control satellite selection, etc) it gets a touch harder to make, but still within the realm of possibility. The good part about Gumstix is that you don't need to get the hardware first to start working on the software, as it's all based on Linux.
I think this idea has a lot of promise, and if I had a transceiver that could computer control, I'd probably start designing it. :)