A little follow up report.
Several people responded either direct to me or via the AMSAT-BB. Thank you to each of you. Between all the various responses I was eventually able to both Nova for Windows and SatPC32 to be able to read the antenna positions and control the rotors. I have a very strong preference of using Nova over SatPC32 so very happy I was able to get that working. I have enjoyed watching the antennas follow several passes of various satellites over the past day or so. Now I need to get new feedlines to the antennas, and fix the radio. One step at a time, but I'm getting there.
Jim K6CCC
On 07/08/2020 19:20, Jim Walls via AMSAT-BB wrote:
I recently bought a FoxDelta ST2-0417 USB rotor interface for my Yaesu G-5500 rotor. I have the ST-2 communicating with the rotor just fine. I can see the azimuth and elevation readout and using the ST2 pushbuttons, I can control both just fine. However, I can't get it to communicate properly with my computer. I am running a Dell desktop under Windows 10 and have installed the CH360G driver. The ST2 shows as COM8 according the the device manager. If I unplug the USB cable, the Device Manager confirms that COM8 goes away and when I plug the cable back in, COM8 returns. I initially was trying to use Nova for Windows (which I have used for 20+ years). I tried every software interface setting (using COM8) and the best I could get a couple weeks ago was Azimuth display and control (no elevation display, but it appeared that it tried to control elevation), but can't manage to replicate that today. Everything shows either 0.0 / 0.0 or ---- / ---- for the rotor pointing in Nova. Somewhat out of desperation, I downloaded SatPC32 and can't even get that far. As far as I can tell, every rotor type is expecting a parallel port interface. Keep in mind that I have never seen SatPC32 until an hour ago, so that may be my issue.
My preference would be to use Nova for Windows, but if that can't be made to work, I CAN switch over to SatPC32. In either case, the software will be used exclusively for rotor control and not doppler correction (not using a radio that supports that).
Do you have any suggestions?