Skype Mobile lameness continues in Android

During the past week my wife and I upgraded our mobile phones and made a major shift away from Blackberry to Android.  This ends (for me) an era which began in 1998 when RIM gave me an Inter@ctive Pager (aka the RIM-900) as part of a pre-sales effort to convince Verifone to use a RIM data module in their Omni 3000 handheld credit card terminal. 

I'll have more to say in future posts about why we made this change, but for today I'm focusing on the ongoing lameness that is Skype Mobile.  You'll recall that I wrote last month about how Skype Mobile's privacy features are sorely lacking because it doesn't allow you to block IM from people not in your contact list.  It also doesn't offer you the ability to report abuse via the mobile client. 

During the switch from Blackberry to Android I'd hoped that these limitations would prove to be a limitation of the Blackberry client, but alas the lameness extends to the Android client as well.  Queries to Skype support have proven fruitless; they basically have said "Skype Mobile doesn't filter non-contact IMs.  Thanks for using Skype Mobile."  This needs to get fixed.  I'm going to launch a Twitter campaign against @SkypeMobile to put pressure on them; if you're interested in lending your voice then follow @W6DTW. 

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.