[Laser] Stepper motor control of laser communication unit

[KY1K]

 >I'm not clear as to how a stepper motor would be any better...

 >My manual equatorial astronomy mount affords easy
 >and simple adjustment in the arc second range. Someone just needs to
 >design and build an altitude/azimuth mount that is as precise!

Hi Phil,

You are right of course.

Some of us spend alot of $$ for commercial precision stages and similar 
devices, the vast majority of us are using homebrewed aiming gear on our 
laser com stations. The best homebrewed gear is shaky at best. You touch it 
and it moves. After it moves, it rarely bounces back to the same position. 
It also tends to move in big jumps rather than small increments as we expect.

Without getting into great detail, the value of motor driven hardware is 
that the operator does not have to touch the aiming hardware directly. Each 
time we touch a knob to adjust homebrewed aiming hardware, we experience 
mechanical instability as mentioned above. By using a motor, we do not 
directly touch the aiming hardware which eliminates a large amount of the 
mechanical instability.

Motor driven hardware is more 'programmable' as well-get the aiming 
anywhere within a degree or so and push the button and let the hardware 
scan until the other end of the path acquires the transmitted beam.  With 2 
hands running knows for alt/az, this type of operation is time consuming 
and hit or miss at best.

Regards,

Art

PS:My best aiming hardware was a transmitter mounted on an old rifle stock. 
When used with a radio link to the distant receiver (liason frequency), I 
could find the receiver in a matter of seconds and easily hold the 
transmitter on target using the receiver audio sent by the rf link. Once 
the receiver was acquired, I would press a button on my memory keyer to 
send a preprogrammed cw message. It worked well and didn't require 
expensive aiming hardware and I didn't need a computer to do the 
'decoding'. This was an experiment (obviously)....your mileage will vary:>: