Pimp My Rig

During the recent severe storms we lost power at home a few times. I had my radios on battery power monitoring various emergency frequencies but at times I was struggling to read some of my equipment with non-backlit displays. A small LED flashlight worked well in a pinch, but afterwards I started to think about how I might improve the lighting at my station without using wall-socket power and/or consuming a lot of my station's reserve battery power.

The answer came to me while I was wandering around a Target store. There's a company called WinPlus that makes a line of auto accessories under the brand name "Type-S"; they offer a lot of dashboard gizmos, LED map lights, gadget holders, etc. Their stuff is actually quite well-conceived, for the most part. One of the items they sell is a "Dash Mood Light Set" which consists of two small "LEDs in a barrel" with 3M adhesive-backed swivel-mounts and a "cigarette lighter" accessory plug. Setup was very simple; all I had to do was plug in the lights (using an accessory socket) and stick the swivel-mounts on the radio faceplates. The lights draw less than 10 mA of current and provide great illumination of the displays even in total darkness. The wires are very slender so I was able to tape them down with black electrical tape and now they're essentially invisible.

What a day....

So today was quite a day. The stock market (and my 401k) tanked on job data and high oil prices. Britney Spears got carted away for observation at a mental hospital after a standoff with police. And the Silicon Valley got slammed by a major storm that toppled trees, knocked over my backyard fence, ripped the roof off of our rental property (complete with flying roof tiles smashing a car window in the process), and bending my Comet CHA-250BX antenna. I'd probably be more upset by all this (except the Britney Spears part) if not for the fact that I'm sick as a dog right now with some kind of nasty virus.

I'm hopeful that the amount of misery in any given year is limited and that I'm getting all of my ick for 2008 out of the way early.

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.