The AA2TX parasitic lindenblad, which was published in Feb 2010 QST (and has been available online for some time), is proving to be an enjoyable project. I have modified some components because I could not find them here in Atlantic Canada. The #8 aluminum wire for the passive elements is not in our big box stores (different wiring regulations?), and the PVC ferrules require a special order, at least at this point in the year, when no sane person would be installing eavestroughing. So I made do with what I had, and the results are encouraging.
The TH-D72 USB port is configured as a CDC device, using the CP2102 USB UART bridge. On Windows, presumably you should use the drivers provided by Kenwood. I accessed the port on my Ubunutu 10.04 desktop just by using /dev/tty.USB0, which popped open when I connected the device. CP2102 support evidently is built into recent kernels. Looking around, it seems that MacOS support is more dicey, so I'll probably experiment with it using a linux box or a virtual linux machine on my MacBook. For the person like me, who is hoping to connect this to an embedded device, there's some particularly bad news: this chip doesn't communicate using the plain CDC-ACM; I'm told it has a proprietary communication system to the host. The best bet is to port the software from the linux kernel, alas.
PCBs for the satpack project arrived from BatchPCB.com about three weeks ago. These are designed to mate with the appropriate pins on a Arduino Mini Pro , and to provide that Arduino with access to the realtime clock, piezoelectric speaker, buttons and mini-din 8 connector required to control a recent Yaesu radio. To the right is one side of the design, the critical side that mates onto the Arduino. The boards are made from this design , but it ought not to be used, due to the errors described below.
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