Ham Radio - A contact sport

Another evening of working on restoring my Prosistel PST 61D. After removing the MOVs from the potentiometer, I plugged the rotator into the control box on the bench.  I could turn the rotator clockwise and counterclockwise, but the readings were not accurate. Time to plug the controller into my laptop and find out if there were any settings issues.

This whole process highlighted for me the things I like least about the Prosistel Rotator (an otherwise very good piece of amateur radio equipment).

1. The software provided by ProSisTel to test/calibrate/adjust the rotator is awful. It might be fine for a hardware developer, production guy or repair tech - but to provide software like this to end users is not good. My beefs with the Prosistel rotator software are:
   • The user interface is bad. Really bad.  Data field range checking issues, terrible color scheme, buttons with labels like
     “cmd L” (below) - this program needs help.
     
   • Error messages are confusing, along the lines of “Communications timeout on <header>”. 
   • It only provides access to 4 com ports.  Getting the Prosistel rotator controller to communicate with my PC is  a chore. 
   • The latest version I could find on-line is over 3 years old - which would be acceptable if it lived up to expectations.
2. The documentation has a lot of room for improvement.  It was revised to include an error that I complained about (pot resistance values were incorrect leading me to some extra headaches when I first installed my PST61D).
   
   
3. We had to remove the rotor from the tower and pull the bottom cover off to get to the MOVs - which had to be removed. You could argue that the MOVs saved the pot - but I already had a ICE rotator line surge suppressor in place which might have taken the blow instead.  Anyway, when the MOVs blow, it would be nice to remove them without taking the rotator off of the tower.
   
4. Slippage on the mast-rotator coupling.  We did not “pin” the mast to the rotator, but we may have to change that.  I did notice a fair amount of slippage due to strong winds. Apparently, I’m not the only one who has seen some mast slippage in a Prosistel rotator.

Now, that said, this still seems to be a very good rotator that has stood up to the challenge. I just need to refine the installation. I can live with the sloppy config software and documentation (two things that I should rarely need to use).  I was eventually able to sort out my serial/coms issues and get the rotator back on track (with the help of my Black Box DB9 Pocket Tester).

Now, with all of that said, would I buy another Prosistel PST61D? 

At this point, I still think that it is the best choice for my application. I want something strong up there - and this rotator has the best specs on the market in its price range…

In my mind, the Prosistel PST61D still compares favorably to other rotators (HyGain, M2, AlfaSpid, Yaesu) in this class.