I am in the process of building an automated satellite tracker. I am interested in working some birds and I do not have the coordination to point and talk at the same time. I need to buy some audrino boards and hardware but I cannot find anything local to the USA. The only place to buy this seems to be eBay or Amazon thats ship from China with an expected delivery in the middle to late July. I know there are suppliers local to the US but I don't know the names and a google search has not proven to be useful. Any help or direction would be greatly appreciated. I have attached the link that breaks down the parts list if this info is needed. Thanks again... https://www.sarcnet.org/rotator-mk1.html#PartsListMk1a Chris KR4YON
Hi Chris, Your searches might be more fruitful looking for "Arduino". Look at Jameco.com and Adafruit.com, plenty of choices for ATMega 328 boards. The tracker is a good project. Please post updates and tell us how you get pn with it
I have successfully built the antenna and motor setup and have it working but I am having problems working gpredict with hamlib. My question is for Ham Radio Deluxe users who have successfully setup the rotor functions or who have made a similar setup and paired it. There have been reports that this will sync to HRD but I don not know where to begin. Any help would be greatly appreciated...
-I have seen several mentions here on the Zed that HRD is not reliable for rotor tracking simultaneously with radio doppler tracking. SatPC32 has been recommended. Note: I don't have experience using recent HRD versions for satellites. SatPC32 has been a mainstay for satellite work for ages.
I want to report that i have successfully paired it with the HRD software. There is a problem with it displaying the readout of the EL/AZ gauges in the program software due to a windows glitch. Other than that its working as described in the linked description. It was actually really easy to setup with HRD when I started to pay more attention the the setup details and read the build notes a little better. 73 Chris
I'm waiting for Cubex Quad antennas to come back out with their Satellite-23 antenna which is much more compact/portable than the Arrow.
Can you talk to me about your experience in building this? I want to build one of these and I too saw that build log/sheet. Was there anything you'd change? Had trouble finding? Yours looks like it came out quite nice. I have SatPC32, so I would be using that for the CAT control on the rig and rotor control. Looking forward to your feedback!! Ryan