CAKE 3/26/16

CAKE Crumbs for March 26th 2016

Our guest speaker on this Easter weekend was David Shoaf  KG6IRW who is a long-time friend and supporter of our CAKE activities. In attendance were Fred KJ6OOV, Peter K6UNO, Peter AB6WM, Frank K6BDK, Glen  KG0T and Jim K9YC

David’s topic was Control and Operation of Remote Amateur Radio Stations

He began by making the distinction between controlling a remote radio and also controlling the many other functions at a station, antenna rotation and selection being two examples.  The three available  connectivity options, (Private, Community, Super-station ) for remote operations were presented in some detail.

The private option involves DIY which means the owner becomes system integrator and is an option appealing to the more technical operators. The community option involves control over multiple remote sites using schemes such as RemoteHams.com. Use of a remote site is typically free. The third option is where an enterprising Ham has developed a powerful station at a highly desirable site. In this case the site owner is responsible for station operation. Users are considered as members and pay for time on the station. Super stations are likely to provide more control over functions beyond that of radio control.

 This is a rapidly growing side of our hobby and David was quite clear that there are many technical imitations and problems to be solved. Among these is the challenging task of remotely seeing the panadapter display in real-time at a remote site. Typical of many examples of rapid growth there is a lack of standards. How this gets resolved depends on the degree of inter vendor cooperation or a market becoming so dominated by a single vendor/solution  that others must fall in line. There might be a possibly that the Opens Systems community could step into the standards arena in but it seems there is no indication of this.
In closing I want to complement David for a text-book delivery. He followed all the rules –few words on each page, defining what was to be covered and what was not and above all a clear vocal, and energetic performance. Most of us lack such skill so David was a great Elmer.
Please note our next meeting on April 9th will be at The Abbey with our normal unstructured discussions.
PS  if you are not a current member of SCCARC please consider becoming one

73  Ron  W6WO