Remote Control Concept

[man...@digitalconfections.com]

Adding a receiver to the Dual-Band ARDF Transmitter would add an additional two boards to the transmitter (now a transceiver) making it no longer fit inside the target chassis box. Rather than adding those boards to the transmitter, I think it would be better to keep them separate. We could support plugging a transmitter and receiver together to create a remote-controllable ARDF transceiver. Remember the Heathkit SB-301 receiver and SB-401 transmitter? Run cables between them and they function as an integrated transceiver. Same concept here.

I'm thinking of using the current "Cloning" connector for connecting a transmitter and receiver. Take a transmitter, and a receiver, connect their Cloning connectors together, and you are done. It will require adding two more pins to the Cloning connector to allow the transmitter to share its antennas (2m and 80m) with the receiver. Communication and control between the Tx and Rx would be handled serially.

The antenna T/R switches will reside inside the transmitter on the optional Antenna Matching board. So it will be necessary to build and install the automatic antenna tuner if you want to use remote control. The logic there is 1) the Antenna Tuner board is where the T/R switches need to reside, and 2) if you are going to more than double the cost of a transmitter by turning it into a transceiver, you probably don't mind (will hardly notice) the extra cost of adding the Antenna Matching board.

Remote control implemented using QSK fox transceivers is at this point in time an experimental concept. But by making these changes to the hardware design now, it is an experimental concept that we can more easily experiment and play with using the Dual-Band transmitter and receiver hardware.

Any thoughts?