Ham Radio/Remote Base

About

Most folks don't have space to put up an HF antenna in or around their apartment, so a logical remedy is using a base transceiver with some kind of remote access. We've set up a prototype which shows promising initial results.

Current Equipment

• IC-7000 HF/VHF/UHF Transceiver
• EeePC Netbook running Ubuntu 10.10
• SignaLink USB

Instructions For Use

• SSH to net.nycr.us:5022. You'll need to forward local port 5901 over your SSH connection. Contact wwward for the credentials.

$ ssh [email protected] -p 5022 -L9999:localhost:5901

• Use a VNC Client to connect to localhost:9999. The password for the VNC session is 'nycresistor'.
• Open fldigi (it's in the main applications menu, or you can use a terminal)
• Configure your callsign by selecting Configure>Operator.
• Make sure the rig control is appropriately configured:
  • Select Configure>Rig Control
  • Click the Hamlib tab, select 'use Hamlib', ensure the Device selection is set to /dev/ttyUSBn where n is some integer, probably 0 or 1. Make sure it actually exists in the drop-down list.
  • Click Initialize, then close. You should see the currently-tuned rig frequency appear in the top-left of the main fldigi window
• Operate away. You'll probably do best with PSK-31 on 20M (14.070MHz). The macros will use your callsign and name data so make sure they're set as you want them.

Other notes

• fldigi is configured to report PSK spots to pskreporter.info as long as it's running. You can turn this off by clicking the "Spot" button in the top right of the fldigi window, such that the green indicator turns off. You probably want this though; you can see the data at www.pskreporter.info, including other folks' spots of you.
• fldigi provides fairly rudimentary rig control (frequency only, pretty much). There aren't very many rich interfaces for controlling ICOM rigs via Linux. A future version of this might use Windows instead, for the benefit of Ham Radio Deluxe
• VNC is slow. Really slow. RDP might be better in the future.