An amazing new toy in the shack, a MicroHAM Arco

Last October when I bought the Ciro Mazzoni Baby Loop antenna and Yaesu G450c rotator I also purchased a fancy MicroHam Arco Smart Antenna Rotator Controller.

At £800 it wasn’t a cheap addition to the shack and it had to go on back order until delivery this week.

Now it’s arrived and been installed in the shack apart from looking incredible, it also provided me with complete touch screen control as well as computer integration via Ham Radio Deluxe.

That means when I enter a callsign into the HRD logging screen I just hit the rotator button and the rotator starts spinning in the right direction all on it’s own. Sure, I could do all that using the manual controls on the G450c controller but it’s just a million time nicer to automate everything

So, not the Arco has arrived (thank you ML&S for such a fast dispatch) what are my first impressions of the Arco?

Looks, build quality and function are nothing other than outstanding. and while it’s a simple design don’t take simple to mean anything other than top quality.

It’s a black aluminium case/box about 10.5 inches wide and 5.5 inches high with a very bright and sharp 7 inch touch screen off to the left and a few manual controls over on the right.

All the ports, plugs and connectors are on the back which makes for a very tidy install in the shack.

First time setup was involved but not difficult. You needed to enter you location, your rotator type and then you are taken through a calibration process that works out the position of the limits of your rotator and it’s heading. This did fail for me a few times but a quick repower and eventually everything fell nicely into place. I’m not 100% sure, but I think these problems were a mix of me not knowing all the right settings to enter for the rotator and the need to fine tune the touch screen.

Once I had everything calibrated I found the touch screen was a little unresponsive but again, a little fine tuning in the setup screens and everything was working as expected.

I’m absolutely blown away with the Arco. No reservations about recommending getting one if your budget allows and I’m sure you would love one as much as I do.

The only thing now is to see how it performs long term so watch this space!