John Mitchell

so ive been sitting on this idea for a while and finally started messing with it last weekend. basically i have an old prop pitch rotator that works fine mechanically but the controller died years ago and replacements are stupid expensive. figured i could just roll my own controller using an arduino mega and a couple of IBT-2 motor driver boards since those can handle the current.
got it mostly working actually, the PID loop is tuning the position feedback from a 10-turn pot geared to the rotator shaft and im reading the voltage with the analog pins. accuracy is pretty decent, maybe plus or minus 2 degrees which is fine for anything above like 50mhz. the part im struggling with is the PC interface. i want to talk to it over serial using the Yaesu GS-232 protocol so it'll just work with existing logging software like N1MM or Ham Radio Deluxe without needing custom drivers or whatever.
anyone done this before? i found a few old github repos but most of them are like 5 years old and either abandoned or written by someone who clearly just learned arduino the week before. wondering if theres a cleaner implementation out there or if i should just write it from scratch at this point

hamstudy is honestly what most people use and it works fine for the tech exam. the question pool isnt as bad as it looks once you start going through it, a lot of the questions kind of repeat the same concepts just worded differently. i did maybe 45 minutes a day for like 3 weeks and passed with a decent score. the electrical stuff and ohms law questions tripped me up at first but if you just understand the basic formula you can work out most of them instead of memorizing the answers. the band plan stuff is mostly just pattern recognition after a while. i wouldnt stress too much, the tech exam isnt that hard if you actually put in some time with the question pool

yeah the drifting issue is super common when you're starting out, dont feel bad about it. what most people figure out eventually is you want to anchor yourself to the downlink, not the uplink. like let the downlink frequency stay fixed in your head and adjust the uplink to chase it. if you set up hamlib right it should be doing most of that work but there's always a little residual error especially near AOS and LOS when the doppler rate is changing fastest.
also worth checking your VFO step size. if hamlib is correcting in big jumps it can sound fine on the waterfall but feel choppy. 100hz steps or smaller makes a big difference on a linear bird. AO-73 is pretty forgiving compared to some of the others, so if you're already making contacts on your second pass you're doing better than a lot of people who take weeks to get their first one.

congrats on the first one, those are always fun. so the threshold for a valid activation is 44 QSOs with unique callsigns, yeah. doesnt matter if you run 3 hours or 30 minutes as long as you hit 44. if you only got 38 you can still upload the log and it goes on record but the reference wont show as activated by you until you either go back and top it up or... well you'd have to go back basically.
on your question about hunters who are also activating at the same time — yeah those count normally from your end, you just log them like any other contact. the fact that theyre sitting in their own reference doesnt change anything for your log. where it gets interesting is THEY can count the contact as a hunter QSO for their own stats while also getting activator credit for their own ref at the same time, so its kind of a win-win when that happens. i love when that comes up in a pileup and someone mentions it over the air.
the wwff.net site is a mess honestly, most of the good info is floating around in Facebook groups or the WWFF reflector. stick with it though, once you get a few activations under your belt it becomes second nature

yeah the simplex fallback thing is real. we had almost the exact same issue in our section drill last spring. everyone is so used to hitting the repeater that when you take it away people kind of freeze up for a second. what we ended up doing after that was building a simplex net into our regular monthly training so operators actually get reps on it, not just as a backup plan on paper.
the NCS handoff problem is something i've seen at every level honestly. the fix that worked for us was having the backup NCS shadow the primary for like the first 20-30 minutes of any activation and actively log traffic, not just listen passively. that way when the handoff happens they already have situational awareness and its not a cold start. sounds obvious but we werent doing it before.
the out of date programming thing though... man that one stings because its so preventable. we actually made it a rule that anyone showing up to an activation has to check in with their call and confirm their radio config during the weekly net the sunday before any scheduled drill. if you cant do that you get a reminder call. not foolproof but it cut down on the frequency mismatch stuff a lot.

yeah i went through the same thing when i first started checking into nets. what helped me was actually listening to a net for a couple weeks before i ever checked in, just to hear how it flowed. every net has its own little culture almost. the Wednesday night one i check into is pretty relaxed, the Sunday morning one is really formal and the NCS runs it by the book. you kind of have to learn each one separately which is a bit annoying but it is what it is.