Microbit RRC-1258 MkII(s) Manual de usuario descargar pdf (Pagina 20)

110

Computers in Amateur Radio

Advantages

A clear advantage of operating remotely is that the station can be

connected to a large antenna, perhaps a full sized dipole on 160m, a

beverage or a tower with a beam on it. Other advantages may include a

reduced level of noise, a problem which most of us who live in a town or

city would undoubtedly suffer from.

For those who like to experiment, gain knowledge, enjoy ‘fiddling

and tweaking’ and having the satisfaction of a remote station working

reasonably well (and I’ll get back to why it doesn’t work well all the time)

then it is all worth the time and expense.

Disadvantages

Cost

For a start the Remote Control units I will be describing are not cheap

and are priced at around £400. The Web Switch, described later, costs

around £160. Assuming you already have a transceiver, a power supply,

antenna system and a free place with free Internet and mains, then your

basic cost at the time of writing has already mounted up to £560, the

price of a small but adequate HF rig!

Latency

Delays in the Internet may cause problems and there will certainly be a

delay between talking at the home end and what is actually transmitted.

I measured mine using ‘traceroute’ command and found 15 hops (rout-

ers) between my home and the remote site and a latency of 60-90ms.

This changes a bit every time I connect to the remote station, as differ-

ent routes are used through different routers on the Internet.

Legality

A remote station needs to conform to current radio licensing regula-

tions, the most important one being for the radio to go back to receive

should the transmitter get stuck. Some modern radios include in their

menu a setup for timeout. I have set mine to five minutes, in the hope

that none of my transmissions will be any longer than that.

Our licence states that our messages ‘must be adequately secure’

from one end to the other, but do not mention what is meant by the word

‘secure’. I am happy with the idea that my signal going into the Internet

and out into my radio is secure, as ‘Joe Public’ is unable to intecept the

data easily. There isn’t much we can do about data between the time that

it leaves our router and arrives at the remote end anyway.

Security

Security of equipment can be of concern if it is hosted on a remote site,

for example in a shed in the middle of a field. These are just the basic

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