Amanda Jackson

i went through this same thing last spring and just ended up ordering the X510 because someone local had one and let me compare it side by side with a cheap comet dual bander they had up. the diamond just felt more solidly built when i had it in my hands, the radials locked in better. no idea if that translates to RF performance but i havent had to touch it since i put it up and we had some pretty gnarly wind this winter so thats something

oh man welcome to the QRP rabbit hole, you are not getting out haha. the frequency drift on the pixie is pretty much baked into the design — its using a colpitts oscillator without any temperature compensation so as the crystal and surrounding components heat up it wanders. some people have had luck adding a small heatsink to the crystal or even putting a little foam over the oscillator section to slow down the thermal changes, but you're never going to make it rock solid without moving to something that has a proper TCXO or a PLL based VFO. if you want to keep building i'd really look at the uBITX or even the bitx40 as a next step. bit more complex but the documentation is incredible and theres a huge community around them. the QRP Labs kits are also really well designed, hans summers puts a lot of thought into those. the QCX series in particular — ive built two of them and they just work, clean signal, good filtering, very happy with both. that ohio contact at 500mw is a great start honestly, once you start chasing states with QRP it gets kind of addictive.

ok so i passed my general exam back in march and ive been kind of afraid to transmit because im not 100% sure where i'm allowed to operate. i know there are band plans and then theres the actual FCC part 97 rules and i keep reading stuff online that contradicts each other. like someone in a facebook group told me generals cant use certain parts of 40m for phone but then someone else said that was outdated info. i looked at the actual part 97 subpart d or whatever and it's honestly kind of hard to parse if you're not used to reading legal documents. is there like a plain english breakdown somewhere that's actually current? and does the arrl band plan have any legal weight or is it just a gentlemans agreement type thing

yeah actually i did almost exactly this about two years ago with a cheap yaesu clone rotator and an arduino uno. the protocol you want to look at is the Yaesu GS-232A/B format — its just plain ASCII over serial, things like "M180" to move to 180 degrees and "C2" to query position. really simple to implement, took me maybe an afternoon to write the parser once i understood the command structure. HRD and most other logging programs have that as an option in the rotator setup so you just point it at the COM port and it works. the L298N should be fine for that motor as long as you're not pulling more than like 2A continuous, if the prop pitch is a bigger motor you might want something beefier. also make sure you put some flyback diodes across the motor terminals if the module doesnt already have them, learned that one the hard way when i fried a board. on the pi question — honestly for just a rotator controller the arduino is cleaner because theres no boot time, it just works instantly when you power it on. i use a pi for my logging setup but i still have the arduino in between for anything that needs to be real time responsive. you could put both in the same box though and have the pi handle the web UI talking to the arduino over USB serial, thats what a few people on the groups.io list have done.