Miteq Minder

This is the sourceforge Miteq Minder web pages

You might be curious as to what a Miteq Minder is. Well let me explain it to you. Miteq is a company that sells satellite and microwave equipment. One popular piece of equipment they sell is the 9600 series upconverter. I have worked with several of these over the years. At present, I've been tasked to use one of these ( a Miteq 9696 ) as the upconverter/exciter for a broadcast satellite earthstation I am building.

These devices are used in the Aerospace, Military, Communications, and other industries involved in satellite operations. The program may (or may not) be usable on other Miteq devices as well, but is best suited for Miteq 9600 series devices.

In order to save (lots of) money in waveguide costs, etc, I opted to run a 70MHz signal via coax to the upconverter, which is situated outside the building. The problem is that we need to be able to remotely control the device from inside the building.

Now Miteq was nice enough to design this piece of equipment so that it would receive remote commands via RS 422. The problem is that they never wrote the program to make it do so. It has the ability, but software was never written.

I step in with programming experience, and write a bunch of snippets of code that will control the device in a pinch. We can now change the frequency, increase or decrease the transmitted signals attenuation levels, get a status of how the machine is operating, etc. It is kind of clunky though, and I would like it to operate more smoothly and look nicer.

So I am offering my software as Open Source, in the hopes that someone with more Python experience can help clean up the rough edges. I do not claim to be the best Python coder in the world. My native programming language was Assembly, followed by Pascal, Cobol, Fortran, Basic, and C. I chose Python, because it is a newer language, it is cross platform, and will most likely work fine on whatever computer the program is placed onto 10 years from now. (Satellite Uplink stations tend to out live computers 4:1).

These are my hopes for the future of the project:

This project is absolutely in the ALPHA stages. Right now there are 8 snippets of code written in python. Sorry, I haven't created an all in one file, or a zip file of these. Truse me that they are indeed not big files or long downloads. It doesn't take a whole lot of code to spew a few characters out a COM port. Also - please forgive me if I am not doing things in the typical SourceForge method. I am oldschool, and used to using telnet and bbs. SSH is a little unfamilair to me, and I'm still trying to learn this new game. I am a quick study, and do take advice - so feel free to comment.

Now for the code:

Attn - Sets the Attenuation level ( Opposite of Amplitude level ) of the transmitted signal

Ch_Freq - Changes the Frequency of the transmitted signal. Also - since by default, it turns the transmitter on, it automatically includes the mute command to turn it back off. It is considered taboo to turn a transmitter on if you are on the wrong frequency. One typo, and you would be stepping on someone elses signal, so an automatic mute is common sense. Why they built it this way, I'll never understand.

ComConnect - Simply put - it checks to see if the COM port is open, and opens it if it is closed.

mute - Turns the transmitter off.

StatusAll - Give the complete status of the upconverter, including whether it is transmitting, what it's present frequency and attenuation levels are, and status of the various equipment alarms.

transmit - Turns the upconverter on, beginning transmission of signal to the satellite. (It turns on the transmitter).

unmute - Same as transmit. Just another way of saying it.

So there you have my programs and code. Anyone who wants to use it may. Any help working on this project would be greatly appreciated. Please don't mess with the checksum part of the code. It is vital, and trust me that it doesn't work any other way. The upconverter simply ignores any commands sent to it with the wrong checksum.

Ray Dall Broadcast Radio Frequency Engineer, part time amateur source code generator, jack of no trades, and all around nice guy.