In the upper right, you will see one of 8 cardinal directions, which shows you which
direction you are closest to: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, and NW.
If you see the error message ‘CABLE’ on the screen, it means the RC1-H box cannot
see your rotor’s position pot. You probably forgot to plug the rotator cable into the
controller, made a mistake in wiring your new Jones plug, or your rotator pot is defective
in some way.
NOTE
: The heart of this control is the rotator’s position pot. If it is defective, the RC1-H
has no way of determining what to do. Although the left and right buttons will still move
the rotor, none of the automatic features will work, as all automatic features depend on
the rotator’s position potentiometer. If your rotator is older, and your pot is noisy and
intermittent, the RC1-H will not be able to work correctly.
Once you have verified the control box is working by manually moving or using the goto
feature and you see the center digits change normally, you are ready for computer
control. Hook up a serial cable to the back of the RC1-H box. A normal, 9-pin straight
through (non-null) cable, is required. Apply power to the control box and give it a few
seconds to power up. Bring up any number of rotor control programs like LP_Rotor or
use the rotor control feature in Ham Radio Deluxe. Follow the instructions with that
program, and set up the proper com port and the RC1-H uses the DCU1 protocol.
There should not be a baud rate option, for all DCU1 uses 4800 baud N, 8, and 1 (no
parity, eight data bits, and one stop bit).
DXView is another program that does automatic rotator control. Some of these
programs require you to tap the cursor on a simulated rotator face, and some a world
map. There are also some that can be set to automatically turn the rotator to the station
appearing in a DX cluster!
We have verified that the RC1-H works well with any of the three programs mentioned
above. A note about HRD version 5: this program will move the antenna but not provide
azimuth feedback. HRD version 6 has been fixed.
Please see the Menu and Customizing section for Advanced Features of the RC1-H,
but, for now, it is pretty simple and powerful to use.
