Craig does have a winner on his hands. Nice rotator and well worth a look for
folks that are tired of rebuilding T2X's.
1) A note about installation. The RD1800 is a cylinder shape and there is no
easy way to grip it for hauling up the tower. In the first one I had hands on,
the rotor came with a screw eye that is inserted into the top of the rotor.
That eye lets you attach your pull rope to the rotor to haul it up. Looked like
a good idea.
Be aware that when items are hauled up a tower on a rope they will often
rotate. If a screw-eye attachment point rotates the wrong way you might find a
rotor dropping away from your haul rope at ~9.9 m/s^2.
2) On N6RO's initial RD1800 we had a problem with a little nylon gear that
drives the indicator potentiometer slipping on it's shaft. When that gear slips
the rotor still rotates, but you don't see any evidence of it on the indicator
box. Craig is going to change that design, but if your rotor has this little
gear simply press fit to the shaft (intial design), you might want to modify it
before installation. We used some super glue to fix Ken's on the tower and so
far that's held, but I doubt that it'll be a permanent fix.
3) For use in side mount applications - the footprint of the RD1800 is a bit
wider than the M2-Orion, T2X, and Yaesu rotors. On some swinging gate type
antenna mounts the rotor won't fit properly and you'll need to make some spacer
blocks to get everything to fit.
Such is life with rotors...I'd still buy the RD1800 in a heartbeat and am
looking forward to seeing how they hold up in use.
Mark
KI7WX
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