Introduction

Currently the rotator support is part of the HamRadioDeluxe executable. There is no reason why it should be part of this executable - in fact there are disadvantages:

1. Makes the whole executable difficult to manage and update,
2. Less 'real estate' for the user interface,
3. Impossible for other programmers to see / understand what's happening.

The programs that make use of rotators are:

• HRD Satellite Tracking,
• Digital Master 780,
• Future: the new HRD Logbook.

In addition many 3rd-party programs would make use of a rotator program given a clean and simple interface.

I am always asked to add support for additional rotators with serial / parallel port and USB interfaces. A new program will allow rotator support to be considerably enhanced without causing prooblems inside Ham Radio Deluxe.

WISP

The current solution which is widely used is WISP by Fernando Mederos CX6DD, however there is no graphical UI such as proposed here, also it's written in Visual Basic (not my favourite language). WISP does contain a lot of rotator knowledge and as far as I can tell the code is open source (but am I not at all sure about this).

All-in-all WISP is an excellent piece of work, hats off to Fernando.

Effort

To get the current HRD rotator support into a nice 'all singing, all dancing' program is about two weeks. Thereafter adding support for new rotators and enhancing support for existing rotators is much easier.

Proposal

A new standalone program:

• Supports an unlimited number of simultaneous rotators - some big stations will typically have many rotators in use.
• Allow rotators to be linked together so that updating Rotator X also updates Rotator Y and Z at the same time.
• Can be driven via the NOVA and ORBITRON DDE interface format.
• A nice big UI with an annotated map of the world - click on the map to set the rotator (short or long path).
• Select bearing via locator, country, ...
• As many presets (Favourites) as you want.

In addition all rotator definitions will be in a separate DLL with C++ source code freely available so other programmers can experiment with new rotator interfaces. The UI code would be made available - but I use a commercial library from www.codejock.com and this requires a licence, without the library the source would be not be much use.

Almost all the code required for this project already exists in Ham Radio Deluxe and HRD Satellite Tracking.

An example of the UI support proposed here is the guages written for the HRD Satellite Tracking: