I am considering making an application to be an ARISS school contact and wonder if a few on the list who have successfully pulled it off might be willing to e-mail me directly and share your experiences on how you got chosen and how you made it happen and whether you would do it again?

My kids are 8 and 9 and this would be a great motivation for science/space/ham radio in their school.

Michael K3MH Bellevue, WA

After running it to a hard stop, disconnecting one wire and running the controller to 360, it now works properly..

From a random plug in of power, all these cheap rotators need a

calibration to get the POINTER motor and the outside motor in sync. You have to rotate the knob to the right stop for over a minute, and then back to the left stop for over a minute. The outside motor will hit the stop and sit there until the insider motor catches up. Then you go the other way, incase the inside was already too far to the right.

Once this is done, they remain in sync. (but only because they assume the two motors will run at the same speed. Periodically you need to re-clibrate to be sure.

But this is how my APRSdos cheap satellite tracking program works. It uses no pots or any feedback. It just runs the motor based on time and then every now and then when it finds itself near South stop, it runs the thing about 45 degrees past the south stop, then recalibrates its "known position to 180". Most of the time, it doesn teven need to do this, because many passes a day go through south, and the mechanicl stops automatically assure it gets calibrated. This is perfectly fine for LEO's and small beams.

It is NOT adequate for OSCAR arrays and HEO's (of which there are none operational now anyway)...

Hence a $70 satellite tracking antenna that only needs a $10 opto-sisolator to a serial port for tracking.

See http://www.ew.usna.edu/~bruninga/rotator1.html

I have a prototype PIC version running that I hope to make avaialble.

Bob, Wb4APR