Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Prepared For Remote DX

Since I am going away this Christmas, I have been working on preparing Kongsfjord for remote control. Easier said than done. First, broadband was delayed by almost three months. It is a radio-based connection with a 5 GHz radio communicating with a base transmitter a few km away. With the radio and antenna up, I connected the PC. Nothing happened. No connection. After a series of trial and errors, it turned out that the equipment was faulty.

New radio, new antenna. Connected to the PC by wire; the speed was as advertised, 2000/500 kbps. Tried to put up a wireless router. No connection. Being rather inexperienced with configuring routers (all previous routers I've had were plug and play), I spent quite a few hours trying to set things right.

This afternoon, a day and a half from going away, I got it working. At the time of writing I am remote controlling my Scaleo PC where two SDR-IQs and one Perseus are demodulating with no problems. A "pro" licence from Logmein has enabled me to have audio from the Scaleo to whatever PC I choose to work from. So, unless we have a power-down or the broadband goes down I should be able to listen to Kongsfjord from my Christmas location in the Lofoten islands.

The Scaleo has 3 GB RAM and a 6400 AMD processor; CPU usage is typically 75-85% with peaks around 90% when all three SDRs are demodulating.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Bjarne!
and good luck with the remote operation. I´ve used remote steering of my SDR-IQ and a serialport steered antennaselector for a few month now. I use XP PRO´s build in Remote Desktop Program just because it worked for me right away (after open a port in the router). I have 8MB down/0,8MB up in both ends but in Spectravue I have to skip 9N updates in "slow CPU mode" menu, otherwise can audio the get shoppy
Bernt-Ivan Holmberg
Moklinta Sweden

Bjarne Mjelde said...

Thanks for reminding me about using slow CPU mode, it might be wise to do that. In Lofoten I will have to depend on a 3G mobile connection so what appars to be smooth operation now needs not be so smooth when my mobile phone is my gateway.