The satellite page configured its own EasyComm or PstRotator link while five
other backends were configured in the rotator list. An operator with one az/el
mast therefore described it twice, and could describe it differently the second
time — a station that works on HF and not on a pass, for no reason visible
anywhere on screen.
Now every interface lives in Settings ▸ Rotator, once, and the satellite page
stores only a KEY into that list plus the tracking policy that is genuinely its
own (minimum elevation, step, park). The key and not the index: deleting the
first rotor must not silently point the tracker at a different mast.
migrateSatRotator() turns an existing satellite link into a real entry in the
list, selects it, and clears the old keys so it cannot run twice.
Which rotors have an elevation axis is now a question with one answer, in Go:
rotatorTypes plus rotorHasElevation, exposed to the panel by GetRotatorTypes.
The dropdown, the labels, each backend's default port and default baud all come
from there, so TypeScript no longer keeps a second copy of the same knowledge to
drift out of step. Three cases do not follow from the type alone and are treated
as such: PstRotator forwards elevation to a mast that may not have any, so the
operator says; a SPID's dialect decides (Rot1Prog has no elevation in its reply
format); and an ARCO and an ERC-M speak the same GS-232 while only one of them
lifts.
Each interface carries an Az / Az+El badge beside it. The satellite rotor
dropdown LISTS the azimuth-only ones, disabled, rather than hiding them: an
operator who owns one rotator and does not see it concludes OpsLog cannot find
it, where a greyed row saying "azimuth only" teaches the actual thing.
ERC-M by DF9GR is new — the az/el interface for a Yaesu G-5500. It emulates
GS-232, so internal/rotator/gs232 grew the elevation half: W for a two-axis
move, C2 to read both, falling back to C+B for the firmware that answers C2 with
the azimuth alone. That fallback is the point of the parser tests: reading such
a reply as "elevation zero" would put the antenna on the horizon, which is the
one wrong answer that looks plausible.
EasyComm II is promoted to an ordinary rotator interface, so it can also turn
the antenna from the compass and from a spot click.
The ERC-M is UNTESTED on hardware. Its Test button reads BOTH axes rather than
just the azimuth, so a controller wired for azimuth alone says so there instead
of during a pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
It handles azimuth and elevation, and a great many stations already run
it in front of a controller OpsLog has never heard of. For those,
OpsLog talking to the controller itself would be a second program
fighting PstRotator over the same cable — so it hands over the bearing
instead, and lets PstRotator turn the mast.
Both kinds sit behind one small interface, chosen in Settings. Neither is
more correct than the other: the right one is whichever the station
already has working.
The 450° overlap is deliberately NOT applied on the PstRotator path.
PstRotator knows which machine is on the other end and does its own; two
programs each deciding to go the long way round is exactly how an antenna
unwinds in the middle of a pass.
Position queries are asked at most every three seconds rather than on
every tick. A PstRotator query binds a socket and waits up to a second
and a half, and many setups answer nothing at all — so one silence is
enough and it stops asking, reporting the commanded position instead and
saying that is what it is.
EasyComm is what satellite rotator controllers agreed on, so a box that
works with SatPC32, Gpredict or Hamlib works here. Serial or TCP, and its
own settings rather than the HF rotator's: an az/el pair is a different
machine on a different port, and an operator who has both must not have
to choose.
A great many EasyComm controllers — the Arduino trackers above all —
accept commands and never say a word back. That is legal and common, so a
silent controller is not treated as a broken one: it is still driven, and
the last commanded position is reported in its place, marked as commanded
rather than read. A stuck rotator must not be able to hide behind an
order it never carried out, which is why the panel shows the antenna's
position beside the satellite's.
The 450° overlap is the reason a satellite rotator is worth having, so it
is used: a pass crossing north continues past 360 instead of unwinding
three quarters of a turn with the antenna sweeping the ground. Below the
configured elevation the mast is left alone — the numbers are right all
the way round the orbit, but a rotator that chases a satellite through
the far side of the earth spends the night turning, and a mast has a
finite number of turns in it.
The hard part of satellite tuning is not the arithmetic, it is deciding
who owns the dial. A tracker that forces both frequencies fights the
operator every time they turn the knob to follow a station across a
linear transponder; one that never touches the receiver leaves them
chasing a signal that slides nine kilohertz across a 70 cm pass.
So the operator owns the receiver and the tracker follows them. Every
second it asks the radio where the receiver actually is. Where it put it,
nothing has changed. Further than a dial-turn's tolerance, and the
operator has chosen a station: what they landed on is converted back into
a nominal frequency, and the transmitter is derived from that. Which is
the division of labour on a linear bird — the operator listens, the radio
does the sums.
Three ways to reach the radio, because a satellite pair is a shape of
operating rather than a manufacturer's feature. An IC-9700 or IC-9100 is
asked for its OWN satellite mode: it pairs main and sub, gives full
duplex, and keeps the dials linked the way its designers meant, which is
always better than an imitation built out of split. A Flex gets two
slices, A the downlink and B the uplink, created when missing, because
"slice B does not exist" is not something to make an operator fix at the
start of a ten-minute pass. Everything else gets the downlink, and is
told so — half the job announced beats half the job hidden.
What goes in the log is the NOMINAL pair. Two stations working each other
through a transponder read different numbers off their dials at the same
instant; the only figure they can both agree on is the transponder's own.
FREQ is the uplink and FREQ_RX the downlink — the one place a satellite
QSO differs from every other kind, and the reason FREQ alone cannot
describe one.
rouggyandClaude Opus 5