N6TR Remote Operation Page

Here is information about the remote contest operations I have done.

2009 ARRL Sweepstakes CW: This was my first real contest effort using remote control. I was operating the station of VE8EV in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. John had a TS2000 radio which I interfaced to using serial port commands over the internet. We used the Ham Radio Deluxe software to emulate a serial port on both ends of the connection and I used a special version of my TR Log program to send the CW using the KY send CW command supported by the TS2000. We used IPSound for the audio. It can be downloaded here. There is a short write-up about this operation on VE8EV’s blog.

2012 ARRL Sweepstakes CW: My next adventure was to operate the CW SS while on a business trip in Bangalore, India. I used my home station. For this contest – I made heavy use of the windows remote desktop applications available. I used two computers in my shack – one was a Windows-98SE box that could both run my DOS logging software and support a remote desktop application (Tight VNC). The other computer was running Windows-7 and I used Teamviewer 7 for the remote hook up. The windows computer was running the audio program and a USB camera that was focused on the front of the radio. The audio program was RemAud by DF3CB. You can find a write-up about this operation here.

2013 ARRL Sweepstakes CW: I was invited to use the station of VY1EI. For this operation – we had Elecraft K3’s on both ends of the internet – and used the RemoteRig boxes on each end. These take care of both the control commands and audio. This really worked very well and would be the solution I recommend. The 3830 write-up is here. You can find the RemoteRig interfaces with custom cables for the Elecraft K3 on the Elecraft web site.

The RemoteRig boxes are also in use for supporting operations by N7LKL in his nearby Portland apartment. He purchased and Alinco transceiver with a removable front panel and the remote rig boxes allow him to keep the front panel at his apartment with the RF part of the radio in my shack. Dave has worked many contacts on CW using this setup.

Contact me via email for more information – tree@kkn.net.

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