Agreed, I can certainly see how that setup would make computer control of the VFO or manual antenna control painful. The Elk I'm using is definitely more amenable to a laid-back approach to antenna rotation.
73, Ryan AI6DO On Wednesday, February 6, 2019, 2:14:14 PM PST, jim@k6ccc.org jim@k6ccc.org wrote:
Part of my difference is technology at the time and what was being used. First of all, I was using El & Az tracking and have 40 elements on UHF, 22 on VHF, and a 2 x 3 foot dish for 2.4 GHz, so tracking was fairly critical. The software was moving the antennas every few seconds on LEO passes. Second, apparently the software has improved. What I was using had no mouse scrolling. All there was was an up button and a down button that stepped in something like 10 (or maybe it was 100) Hz steps (non-selectable). That meant to move across the passband required hundreds or thousands of button clicks. You could also type in a specific frequency. It was horrible. Used it about three times and decided that I would never use it ever again. Now, I will point out that if the radio had two way CAT control, you could spin the knob on the radio and it would read the change from the radio - but alas, the early Yaesu 7356 radios did not have two way CAT control. The manual largely assumed that you would normally operate by spinning the knob on the radio and only use the up / down buttons for fine tuning.
Personally I never had any trouble manually tuning the radio.
Jim Walls - K6CCC jim@k6ccc.org
-----Original Message----- From: "Ryan Noguchi via AMSAT-BB" amsat-bb@amsat.org Sent: Wednesday, February 6, 2019 13:27 To: "AMSAT BB" amsat-bb@amsat.org Subject: Re: [amsat-bb] Operating SSB sats
I do the opposite. I find it's a lot less of a pain to manually control an azimuth-only rotator than to have to manually tune both VFOs to correct for Doppler and hunt for signals. Having a panadapter display of the downlink passband is incredibly helpful at avoiding the need for the latter. By twirling the mouse wheel, I can control the VFO (with automatic reverse-tracking) at various tuning speeds based on which digit of the Rx frequency in the HDSDR application the mouse pointer is on: 100Hz, 1kHz, 10kHz etc or just click on the signal in the waterfall display.
73, Ryan AI6DO On Wednesday, February 6, 2019, 11:38:58 AM PST, jim@k6ccc.org jim@k6ccc.org wrote:
The thing to keep in mind is that there are lots of out there that are not capable of operating fully computer controlled because of equipment limitations. Although it's been a few years since I've been on the birds, I used an early Yaesu 736 which has one way CAT control. Although theoretically possible to completely contgrol frequency with a PC that way, it is such a pain in the ass to dial around a passband looking for contacts from the computer as compared to grabbing the VFO knob on the radio. I usedd teh computer to control the antennas but not the VFO.
73 ----- Jim Walls - K6CCC jim@k6ccc.org