At 03:36 PM 12/2/02 -0500, Rudy Marcelletti, K8SWD wrote:
>Erik: You take a lightning hit? I don't computer control my G1000SDX,
>but you describe what mine did for a while after a close strike, or direct
>hit--I don't know which. The needle would spin around uncontrollably and
>sometimes point in the right direction, sometimes not. When I would look
>outside, the antenna was aiming correctly where I had the preset pointing,
>but the needle would spin wildly, but would eventually stop in the
>vacinity where I was pointed. Well, this summer I took another
>hit--direct I think. It wiped out about $3,500.00 of on non-ham stuff in
>the house, but only 2 ham power supplies. My rotor is now FIXED! No
>explanation for it other than something up top was loose as my controller
>was disconnected at the time of the storm, and lightning fixed it!
I have seen this behavior when the Cinch plugs in my Yaesu rotator control
lines were flakey -- fixed them with an application of Caig R5. The notion
that lightning fixed a control box full of semiconductors strikes me as
pretty creative. More likely you had bad connections somewhere, and
something serendipitous caused them to go good again. I suppose its
conceivable that the pot itself was intermittently open -- don't know about
that one.
73, Pete N4ZR
Sometimes a tower is just a tower
|