[amsat-bb] Programming question - dish angle

[Phil <phil@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

I'm looking for ideas. I have some code that counts the azimuth and elevation 
pulses from my dish rotator and then displays the positions on a 2 line 16 
character LCD display.

There is a direct correlation between counted pulses for azimuth position but 
not for elevation. I apply the cos rule to get the dish angle based on the 
length of the actuator arm. So far so good.

It seems like a good idea to have a PIC take over the roles of pulse counting 
and display because the CPU is already pretty busy with Doppler correction 
calculations and uplink aerial positioning, plus other Amateur Radio related 
tasks. However, I can't think of any way to calculate the elevation angle 
using the PIC's instruction set.

How do pulse counting controllers usually accomplish this feat? Look-up tables 
maybe?

-- 
Regards,
Phil.


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