Lowell White wrote:
My Yaesu G-5400 rotor pair is about 150' from my shack.
I am wanting to gauge the feasibility of putting the rotor controller within 100' (due to on-hand control cable lengths) of the antennas (in a garage).
I would then run a separate (on-hand) PC-controller cable (fewer conductors as using the DIN interface on the back of the controller) to the rotor controller box from a PC and adapter / interface (if needed) in my shack (approx. 50').
Is it crazy to consider or should I just pony up for more of the (dual) rotor control cable and run the control box itself in my shack?
What would I need to do at the PC end to appropriately 'signal' the 'semi-remote' control box.
I am making an assumption, that may not be the case. I am assuming that there is a protected location closer to the tower. For example the tower is next to the garage and the shack is in the house. If that is the case, what I would do is run the remote control PC at the remote location, and control it over your LAN with a remote desktop program such as VNC (http://www.realvnc.com/). That does make the assumption that you have an extra PC floating around, but for most of us the question is not IF we have one, but rather which of of the several should I use... It also assumes that you have a house LAN - although if you don't, most PCs these days have a network connection already built in so it would be easy to implement.