On 6/17/13 1:01 PM, Patrick Greenlee wrote:
I don't have a dog in this fight, yet, but almost. What about towers
200 ft away from the shack or 300 or more. I am in the S L O W
process of putting up three towers and they will be daisy chained for
some semblance of efficiency in cabling rather than a star or other
control line and coax gobbling pattern. This puts the last tower in
line the farthest away from the shack and at least 200 ft straight line
(I'm still trenching for the coax run to the first tower and working on
the excavation and rebar cage for one of the towers. Just how practical
would it be to replace control lines with RF links?
I will have to trench to all the towers installing conduit for the coax
and running another conduit with AC power for electric winches, lights,
and convenience outlets so the trade off study will be hard wire to
everything for control vs remote control. I will have remote coax
relays at each tower that need to be switched as well as rotor cables.
So, I'm open to information regarding feasibility of radio remote
control vs hardwire control. Casual conjecture or vague refs to Google
are not productive. Anyone out there have actual experience they'd care
to share?
What kind of switching complexity are you looking at?
You can get a serial interface 8 channel relay board from Velleman for
$50, and it would lend itself to something like a current loop interface
needing only two wires.
Running 110V out to the towers as a separate branch circuit, and local
power supplies is a pretty effective way to do stuff. 12 and 24V power
supplies are very cheap.
If you want a bit more sophisticated, something like an Arduino with a
relay board would be in the <$100 range, and could give you a lot of
sophistication.
WiFi can easily go hundreds of feet with directional antennas, and you
can arrange the system so it is "lightning proof" for all intents and
purposes.
_______________________________________________
_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
|