Remote setup finally working

Last friday I finally had everything working on my remote control station.

First QSOs were:

MD0CCE 15m CW
LX/PA3EWP 40m CW
LY37R 40m CW
VE7IG 30m CW
OH5JJL 30m CW

Next step is to make CAT with DX4WIN work on the control (operator) end.

From Wi-fi to wired at the station end

After more than a year trying to make it work, usually with marginal results, I finally gave up the Wi-fi link to the remote station. Armed with 60m of white UTP cable, short and tall ladders and some helping hands, I changed the internet connection of the remote station to a wired link.

The results were immediate, and now I can access, control and hear the remote radio with much more reliability.

I definitely do not recommend a lengthy Wi-fi connection at the station end for remote operation use.

Another tip from the learned lessons book is that you have to use first class workmanship on all items of the station. Both good material and careful execution are essential. For a few weeks I could not access the radio, and when inspecting it on site I found a bad Powerpole connection on my RigRunner (my fault, Rigrunners and Powerpoles are great). This knocked off my Microkeyer, killing the link between the PC and the transceiver.

Now everything is online again, with decent response speed.

Using CW Skimmer and PowerSDR-IF with K3

This last weekend was the ARRL DX CW, an old favorite for me. I couldn't travel to my station, so I decided to make just a few contacts from home and test some new ideas.

My goal was to have CW-Skimmer decoding the band I was working, generating spots to win-test.

For that, I connected my K3 to the LP-Pan panadapter and an E-MU 0202 USB Soundcard. The K3 was also connected to a Microham Microkeyer II.

This is the basic setup:



The interface to the transceiver is through the MKII. The Microham USB Router software allows for two CAT virtual COM ports, and I routed one directly to the logging software (Win-test) and the other to LP-Bridge, a piece of software by Larry, N8LP, that further splits the CAT chain. LP-Bridge provides CAT virtual COM ports for the PowerSDR-IF (panoramic display), and for the CW Skimmer.

The CW Skimmer has a built in telnet server, which is accessed by the Win-test DX-Telnet application (part of the Win-test suite) as a local host. After logging-in the spots from Skimmer start flowing into Win-test and are plotted in the bandmap.

The important thing is to keep track of all configurations used. There are several virtual COM ports involved, and the settings must be identical at both sides of the communication link. I took printscreens of all configuration windows, for future reference.

When I first started using PowerSDR and LP-Pan, a few months ago, I had some problems with spur images along the spectrum display. That was solved by replacing the cables between the LP-PAN and the soundcard with some better quality ones (Radio Shack part #42-2433).

As I said, this was not a major contest effort, I just made a bunch of QSOs to check the setup. I still don't know how it will perform during a major effort, but the results look promising. From my little operating, I noticed I almost never checked the Pan display at PowerSDR-IF. Maybe it can be dropped to save computer resources. By the way, my not-so-new Sony Vaio FE (dual core, 1.66MHz) did handle all the simultaneous tasks quite well.

Of course the use of Skimmer makes this a Single Operator - Assisted entry.

Some links:

LP-PAN
PowerSDR-IF

And a nice video in Youtube (not mine)

I'll post some photos and videos in the future.

73 de PY1KN

Ready to deploy

After finally healing my broken foot, and being able to travel to the beach house, I will assemble my remote station this weekend. After a lot of testing, everything was packed, including a brand new TS-480HX transceiver.



This box carries the wi-fi stuff. Since the shack is away from the house, I'll have to build an external antenna/router combination, to have good and reliable internet access at the station. I found this to be the most difficult part to setup, as I had to learn my way with fixed IPs, DNS and all that LAN stuff.

Time to hit the road, and hope everything works as expected!

A piece of beauty

I needed a key to use at the control end of my remote controlled station. It had to be a key capable of withstanding being carried arroud a lot, along with the remoterig control. I've broken the paddles of some keys before, when travelling to operate contests, so something different was needed. The natural choice came to be the Begali Magnectic Traveller Light, a compact and rugged key, built to "survive the rigors of a roving life" as they state in their website. In contacing Bengali I came in touch with Bruna, Pietro Begali's daughter, who takes care of the administrative side of the business. She was very helpful and knowledgeable.

I placed my order using paypal, and after a few days I received an email form Bruna telling me that my key was on its way. The next day all traffic air in Europe was halted due to the volcano eruption in Iceland. Bad timing! Eventually my pack arrived, and what a joy! It's a beautiful piece of carefully crafted hardware. And it came with a nice plastic box, a cleaning tissue, the connecting cable with 0,35mm plugs at both ends, a 0,03mm metal gauge for spacing adjustment, and even some courtesy advertisement blank QSL cards. And for the more adventurous folks, it also comes with a strap designed to fasten it to your leg . All all carefully packed in a carton box filled with styro.

Here is the key strapped to my leg. Hmm, I'm starting to feel adventurous. Backpacking anyone?

Please note that the plastic top is clear. I did not remove the protective tape.

The appearence and craftmanship are really outstading, but how does it score on the functional test?

Well, it feels really great. The keying is smooth, due to the magnectic return mechanism. Contact is perfect, as contacts are gold plated. I was a little worried that the key, due to its own purpose, would be a little too much on the light side, I didn't want to chase it around the table while keying. But my fears went away as I first tried it. I went as fast as I could, and it remained stable even on QRQ.

This is my first Begali key, but I'm so happy with it that I can't help checking their website drooling over all those beautiful keys. Certainly other keys will follow.

Thanks Begali for such a piece of beauty.

http://www.i2rtf.com/index.html

K1EL keyer kit

Kit building is a time proven amateur radio tradition. The golden era was during the days of Heathkit, a company that sold kits ranging from simple testing gear to complete transceivers.

The advent of large integration, surface mouted components and complex circuits somewhat cast this tradition aside but the recent times have seen a comeback.

The most emblematic case is Elecraft, that sells one of the best transceivers in the market today in kit form. But there are also other interesting kits on the market.

Searching for a way to transmit CW at my remote station using a key at my end, I was brought attention to a piece of software called wkremote by K1EL. It uses two winkey keyers on a back to back configuration, one at each side of the connection. I will write more about it on a future post.

Since I already have a winkey keyer at the radio end (a microham microkeyer II), I needed just one additional winkey keyer. here comes K1EL, who sells great keyers as kits.

I ordered a winkeyer USB kit and soon it arrived. The kit is complete and easy to assemble, I completed it on a sunday afternoon, and I am not a very experienced builder.

The keyer is great, with memmories and fully configurable. It takes power from the USB connection or, when used as standalone, from 2 AAA batteries.

The instructions are complete and detailed. The best of building it was the sense of pride when I first fired it and it worked perfectly.

Amateur radio at its best!