ALC and Band Data

[Dick Green WC1M]

Hmmm. Just looked at the back of my Orion, and in the manual, and darned if
I can't find an ALC jack. Guess Ten-Tec figured every owner would buy a
Titan :-) My FT-1000D has an ALC jack, but I've never used it. FWIW, the
manuals for my Alpha and Acom amps discourage use of ALC. I've tried to use
it on other tube amp through the years, always with poor results. I was
surprised to hear that solid-state amps require ALC. Guess I won't be buying
one of those.

 

On band data polarity, I had to laugh when I saw the posts about that. The
Orion doesn't follow the Yaesu standard, either. The Band Data jack has
individual outputs for each band, with +12VDC for the active band. All well
and good if you have positive-keyed relays, but at the time my antenna
system had mostly GND-activated relays (e.g., TopTen), and the decoded
GND-active band data was fed to a very complex homebrew antenna switching
logic interface before being passed on to the antenna relays. Also, I had
modified my TopTen Band Decoders to provide both positive and GND active
outputs, access to the TX OUT and TX INH pins, etc. So, I ended up building
a circuit to encode the Orion's individual band data outputs in
Yaesu-standard BCD for the band decoder! As I recall, it only took one IC
and a few other parts to do it. That's hardly the first interface I've build
to achieve compatibility between different pieces of equipment in my
station. I'm not saying Elecraft should have departed from the Yaesu
standard, but the more complex the station, the more we have to expect to
need some special interfaces.

 

BTW, I ditched the homebrew encoder, band decoders and homebrew logic
interface, and wrote a Windows app to get the frequency information for both
rigs from my contest logging program and send relay commands via Ethernet to
a pair of Hamation Relay Drivers. Got rid of a lot of messy wires and
interface boxes, and was able to add a lot of functionality and flexibility
(like autotuning a splittable 3-stack of SteppIRs and an Acom 2000a amp.)
One of the functions is hot switch protection via each rig's TX INH (GND to
enable), which is why I need that feature to work in the K3! As it is, I had
to build an interface box to mix several different sources of hot switch
protection (my PC-based system, a microHam StackMax, etc.)

 

Seems like the soldering iron never gets cold here.

 

73, Dick WC1M

 

 

 

_______________________________________________
Elecraft mailing list
Post to: [hidden email]
You must be a subscriber to post to the list.
Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.):
 http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft   

Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm
Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com