Wednesday, December 19, 2007

TS-2000 Remote Control w/ Audio


One of the fun but also useful capabilities to have in your shack is the ability to run your rig remotely. I decided to do this for my Kenwood TS-2000 since it's basically a radio wrapped around a computer and has a zillion interface options. Kenwood makes ARCP-2000, a remote display program which frankly isn't worth the $250 they ask for it. Ham Radio Deluxe (aka HRD) is a great program; it's feature-rich, highly configurable, and best of all free. You can run it over a screen-scraper like VNC, Remote Desktop, or even X-Windows. A better solution is to use the HRD remote access system; this essentially allows you to tunnel serial data to your rig and control it via a remote instance of HRD.

Two challenges exist here; publishing the HRD server over the Internet without open router firewall ports, and creating a high-quality and stable audio path.

Dealing with the server question first; I absolutely do not recommend opening holes in your firewall. There are a lot of solutions available which eliminate that need. I use Hamachi which has an additional benefit in that the clients are coordinated via a central server so a static DNS is not required. I simply point my remote HRD instance at the private IP assigned to my home system by Hamachi and I'm connected.

Getting quality audio across the Internet used to be a challenge, but after using Skype this year for business I think it's ready for prime time. I created a separate Skype client ID intended only for receiving inbound calls from me when I'm remote. I set Skype to auto-answer, and point the audio paths to my rig's sound interface.

Detailed diagram of my setup is available here.

5 comments:

Randy said...

Hi came across your blog. I have about the same setup for remote control. I use TRX-MANAGER for radio control and logmein for remote desktop control of computer. And skype for the audio link. Works great, watch my demo.

Randy K7AGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whe9nV9InnQ

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hi there, using HRD I noticed the possebility of remote control. Unfortenatly it seems to be too difficult to configure my wireless router/modem to open ports. So I was searching for another solution. Found it at www.ntrconnect.com, works well and use skype for audio. Advantage is that I can control my radio on any internetcomputer.

73 de PE4BAS Bas

Bob/Paul said...

HRD is a windows application. How is it be possible to run on X-Windows?

73 KC0WIV Paul

W6DTW said...

Bob/Paul,

Have you considered Googling for "linux rig control"? You will find some viable options. You may also want to take a look at:

http://radio.linux.org.au/?sectpat=rigcontrol&ordpat=title

73,

...dtw

thevidiot said...

For audio, I use IP-Sound rather than Skype. It is peer to peer and has lots of codecs available for various amounts of compression/quality. While SM5VXC is no longer updating the program, I have found that it doesn't require any additional features. Do a search for Christopher's call sign (SM5VXC) to find it.