Maxi controller QRV

Today I completed construction of the Mk II Maxi Controller and put it into service as my main station radio controller. This involved moving the host controller code over to my station PC - the first time the code has been fully separated from its development environment.

The development environment is a considerably more powerful system, so I was interesting to see how the controller would work on a less powerful and, perhaps, more commonplace processor. In fact only one problem emerged - it was necessary to add a few lines of code to ensure that the default  Windows time slice was set correctly so that the many timers in the code would work reliably. This had not been a problem on the development machine but it was soon readily apparent on the station system!

So this is a big step forward today. The Mk I controller has been retired and I am now fully operational with the Mk II hybrid architecture. So far it seems to work just fine, although conditions are poor and there's not much to work.

Big empty box! All the Maxi hardware is on the panel PCB

At least the box can be used as a base for the microHAM

A general view of the 'WGV station