Years ago there was a company called “Portable Rotation” that made a very decent portable AZ-EL rotor. It ran off of 12 VDC, it wasn’t as heavy as a Yaesu Az/El rotor, but it was a hand full. It required a pretty hefty tripod to hold it. I mounted a pair of Arrow “Alaskan” beams on it (one side 2m, the other 70cm). Between the antennas, rotor, tripod, and cables, it was probably close to 50 pounds of stuff, and took up much of my trunk. It worked very well, but I wasn’t willing to spend 45 minutes putting it together and another 30 minutes pulling it apart to make satellite contacts in the field. So I stopped using it.
Since then, all my Summer and Winter Field Day satellite activity has been using the smaller Arrow crossed beam. Many folks hand-hold it, but I mount it on a camera tripod and point is where the bird will be about 1/3 of the way through the pass. That gives me excellent S9 signals on the linear birds, and a decent chance to make it through the chaos of an FM bird.
But for years a little voice has been saying “What if there was a smaller, lighter, easier to use Az/El rotor that was optimized for the 3×7 Arrow crossed beam?” Oddly enough a Google AI+ search came up with a kit for exactly what I was looking for.
Don Friend WA4MCM has designed a kit called the PSR-100 Mk2 Portable Satellite Antenna Rotor Kit. I ordered one on Sept 1st, and it arrived on Sept 5.
The above photo shows the box that arrived in the mail, all 3+ pounds of it. Don used every cubic inch of space fitting all the parts in.
The photo above shows all the carefully bagged sets of parts that were in the box. I counted 34 bags and resin parts. Speaking of the plastic parts, they were VERY well printed, much higher resolution that I am used to, and appear to be quite robust.
In terms of electronics, a few SMT parts are on the PCB already, but I’m surprised the resistors and capacitors (23 of them) weren’t mounted as well, but they are through-hole. There are a dozen small headers to solder in, a dozen FETs and diodes, and three other semiconductor items to install. Pretty much a very simple electronics build on a board that has ample space to work with. I’m guessing about an hour of assembly time.
The mechanical stuff abounds – more than half of the bags are full of fasteners, bearings, shafts, etc. No doubt that will take the bulk of the time to assemble.
When it is all done, one communicates with the rotor via WiFi using a built in web server, and it is fully compatible with the S.A.T. Controller.
More to follow as things are put together!
