[WA0UWH] Minima - Wayne's Build

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WA0UWH - Electronics & HAM Radio Blog

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Minima - Wayne's Build

Posted: 08 Sep 2014 07:47 PM PDT
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Wa0uwh-HamRadioBlog/~3/b-ar3tH-HGw/minima-waynes-build.html

Sunday I had a chance to work with Jeff - KO7M via Skype for a few hours.
He has the loan of Wayne's (NB6M) Minima Transceiver for a few weeks while
Wayne is on vacation - Thanks Wayne.

A large part of the discussion was about "How to Use Git and GitHub" for
software development.
Wayne's Mimima
Afterwards, we decided to try to update Wayne's Minima to my latest
Alternate Tuning Method transceiver control code. Wayne had previously
downloaded and was using a much older copy of my code. The older copy did
NOT have many of the NEW and current features and functions. Our goal was
to exercise these new features on Wayne's hardware.

When we first downloaded my NEW Revision, Wayne's Minima went NUTS, with a
loud Buzzing sound on all frequencies.

We reinstalled the old software and the Buzz went away.

Something that I had done over the last few weeks has made my software
almost useless. With a little work and via the process of elimination
(removing sections of code) Jeff was able to track down the offending
routine.

I had inappropriately moved two of the PTT Pin Initialization Statements to
within the main TX/RX Idle Loop. This pin is also used to control the TX/RX
relay. Rapid re-initialization of the PTT pin was producing hash that the
receiver was picking up. Removing the two nu-necessary and redundant
statements solved the problem. Initization of the PTT pin is now done
between Receive and Transmit and then when switched back.

The GitHub copy has now been updated.

While we had Wayne's Minima NOW working so well with the new updated code,
I wanted to exercise each of the new functions. Wayne does not yet have
a "seventh" push button installed, and therefore we had to use a jumper
wire as a switch to access some of the functions. For the full list of new
functions that I have added to Farhan's original Minima code, see Link.
Everything worked better than expected - I am a Happy Camper.

One of my main interest was to see how well the CW ID and MACRO's worked,
and how well the QRSS Beacon worked. They actually worked much better than
expected!!

The Non-Volatile Save and Load of User Memories worked as expected. Dial
Calibration for both USB and LSB was an easy task.

Over the next few weeks, Jeff will be introducing some new hardware support
and functionality for the Minima. He has plans for multiple Si570's (VFO
and BFO), other I2C Displays and more. See his blog at:
http://ko7m.blogspot.com/search/label/Minima.

Contributing to the Minima Hardware and Software has been a very rewarding
and interesting project, . . . Thanks, Farhan.