The motor choice is unfortunately not my choice as the anttena assembly is alrea
dy in place and they are basically using a switch to provide
a pulse to the control board to make the motor advance. The receiver analyser is
 part of a separate system as well so that value does not
need to be recorded.

Anne Ogborn wrote:
>
> I'm in agreement with whoever posted that you should just use a common motor.
>
> Since this sounds like a "one time" thing, consider buying a hefty sized wall
> clock and attaching the antenna to the minute hand. Unless your
> mechanical alignment is the pride of the machinist's art, you
> should be able to simply turn on a switch starting the clock and
> press the "start" button on the software.
> Every nn seconds, read the data from the receiver (heck, every nn seconds,
> read the data from the meter and type it into excel).
>
> If your antenna is heftier, consider (I'm not joking) a wind-up spring type
> motor. They usually have lots of oomph.
>
> Now, the "we gotta be serious" answer -
>
> Get a machinist's rotary table. Attach a fractional HP gearhead motor to
> the handle, with a cam that trips a switch each revolution (or use the encoder
,
> but that's overkill). To start the test, crank the unit to 0.000 - turn the mo
tor on
> and take a data point each time the switch trips.
>
> If you're doing this once, forget the switch, cam, etc. - get an assistant to
turn the
> crank and shout to you each time, then type the value into Excel.
>
> the sick answer.
> Mount the unit on a big flywheel and spin. Take data at a constant rate contin
uously.
> You should get a repeating pattern you can extract the flywheel frequency from
.
>
> If this is a humungeous radar antenna, it should act as it's own flywheel -
> just power it like normal, take data for a couple revolutions, and find the ro
tation speed.
> If you know the sample rate you know the angular spread of the samples.
>
> As in everything, the question is, how many of these antennas do you want to m
easure?
> How fast do you need to do it? And what's the cost of engineering vs. labor?
>
> People often forget that it IS possible to do it manually.
>
> --
> Anniepoo
> Need loco motors?
> http://www.idiom.com/~anniepoo/depot/motors.html

--
_____________________________________________________________________
                           _
Gary Cadman,             _| |_
MOS Design               \.  _}               Tel. +44 (0)1604 663490
Northampton         TEXAS  \(  INSTRUMENTS    Fax. +44 (0)1604 663456
Test and Verification                  mailto:gary.cadman@tiuk.ti.com
_____________________________________________________________________