With a recent location change to Elgin, Scotland I had to implement some temporary shack changes to get back on air quickly. The biggest annoyance with rotators is the fact it needs two control cables and with the temporary shack being the corner of the kitchen I must bring the cables through the window.

To get around the need to constantly wire up the G-5500 controller every time I wanted to use it, I took the route of using a Raspberry Pi3 as a TCP serial server, which isn’t so hard to-do using Ser2Net

Installation is easy on the command-line by just using

sudo apt-get install ser2net

You’ll then need to adjust the configuration file in /etc/ser2net.conf so that its pointing to the correct serial device and the settings are configured, for myself it’s the following with the FoxDelta ST2 connected to a usb to serial device.

BANNER:banner:\r\nser2net port \p device \d [\s] (Debian GNU/Linux)\r\n\r\n

2000:telnet:600:/dev/ttyUSB0:9600 8DATABITS NONE 1STOPBIT banner

Once this has been changed either restart the ser2net service or just reboot the Raspberry Pi, you’ll need to know the IP address of the Pi and I’d recommend making it static on the network so you don’t have to keep finding it.

On the windows computer you’ll need com0com https://sourceforge.net/projects/com0com/files/and com2tcp this will give you a virtual serial port to connect SatPC32 too.

To get it connected you use com2tcp and issue it some commands for example

com2tcp.exe --ignore-dsr --baud 9600 \.\Virtual-Comport-Number ip-address port-number

Once you have this running SatPC32 should start controlling the rotator like if it was sat in the shack, saving long cable runs.

RemoteQTH has some excellent information about ser2net at https://www.remoteqth.com/wiki/index.php?page=Ser2Net I used this to get going.