RXADS progress #3

3 May 2014 by sm0w, No Comments »

Was quite some time since i posted anything to the blog. Life's been busy. We're just in the process of moving into a house so most of the time has been spent on that. But I have still had some time to do some ham radio stuff in between everything =) I have mostly been working on the RX Antenna Distribution System (RXADS). It's nearly finished now, two band pass filter units are missing and when they are done I need to do more exstensive measurements of everything, but at the moment insertionloss through the system is well below 1dB which is really good! The most inserionloss occours in the band pass filter units of course!

This is how the 1RU box looks like!

And on the inside like this:

The card closest to the camera is the combiner card, the the openASC driver module that will connect the unit to the rest of the antenna switching at the station. After that the interface card that collects and filters all low level signals between the driver card, arduino micro controller, band pass filters and the switchingcards that will be in the forest. In the middle the blue card which is the bought Arduino programmable microprocessor that works as the logic in the system and to the far right the band pass filters. You can see two is still missing, they actually take some time to make, I will post more on them later.

It was really fun to start learning the Arduino and I got the source code ready and working after many hours of pulling hair, but I think I got the hang of it now 😉

I also finished the Switchbox for the WARC bands this weekend, so tomorrow I will go up to the station and hook it up in the rest of the system. Some pics here:

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OJØR Market Reef

OJØR Market Reef

OJØR is my callsign during visits to the barren rock of Market Reef in the middle of the Baltic sea. [&hellip