On Nov 1, 12:34*pm, you wrote:
In article
,
*Art Unwin wrote:



Browsing thru E bay I came across a 1kw
antenna tuner for sale from Cyprus.Now in my younger days I got hold
of one of these and intended to salvage a Icom AH2 to somehow make it
remote since I use Icom radios. After all there are only three motors
that have to be driven! Now I am retired I pulled my old one from
storage after seeing the same on E bay. Question is are there any
kits, salvage ideas out there that would get me going on this long
lost project?
I have never used a external tuner but this seems like a realistic
project to play with.
Of course if there is a unit out there that I can salvage a controller
that is all the better. There are very good photos of this particular
tuner on E bay but like mine it has no controller! I suppose I could
feed a 10 watt signal to it and control the motors by hand to tune but
I do like the idea of automation.
Regards
Art

It isn't the tuner hardware that is going to be a problem, as much as
designing the tuning algorithm that drives the hardware. Mark Johnson
did a very good job, reverse engineering the stuff that Bill Shield
brought west from Motorola Military back in the 70's for the SEA
Autotuners. SGC copied the SEA Firmware & Design enbank, for their
stuff. The best stuff, was the stuff Collins did for their Military
Autotuners. Starting from scratch is going to be a BIG design project.

My problem as far as I can see is that the control for the AH2 is that
the innards are transferable but it only controls two motors where as
my tuner has three.
I suppose I could just use two and not utelise the fine tune inductor.
Will sleep on it for a while and look at the AH4 version or in the
worst case fine tune by hand if necessary. I suspect the fine tune is
not really necessary in most cases other than satisfy the over
zealious swr users