[Moon-net] Re-inventing the wheel? Pulse counting position readout

[Mark GM4ISM]

Hi all,
Following an exciting weekend on 3.4GHz EME, I need to make some improvements
Not least one of my Buccaneer ejector seat linear actuators is very sick.
I plan to replace it with a satellite actuator and this will have the added benefit of a pulse based position indicator.
The dish azimuth is set (manually) with the actuator zeroed and from then the linear actuator pushes the dish west..
What I would like is to have a PIC based up-down pulse counter, that can use a lookup table or similar to convert pulses to degrees, with the ability to enter the 'Zero' offset value in degrees. Display on a 2 x 16 character LCD or similar is envisaged
Probably very simple, but as PIC programming is not exactly familiar to me, It would be helpful if anyone has done this before (or similar) so as not to re-invent the wheel.

Regards
Mark GM4ISM