It’s Friday afternoon, still at the office and sitting in front of my computer and remote control my HF station (IC-706) at home. Well that is a lie. At home I don’t even have a radio and antennas. All my equipment is installed at my parents house out on the countryside with large space and little man-made noise so it’s a real joy listening to 160/80m and so on. 

With this setup I can remote control my shack from everywhere in the world as long as I have a computer, internet and a headset with microphone. A couple days a go I worked Japan (distance=8000km) on 20m from my office in the lunch break.   

The downside with this kind of setup is the tiny delay with the sound and activate/release the PTT button.  Sometimes it’s difficult to work a pileup bacuse of the milliseconds with delay. If you have a poor internet connection you can suffer stutter on the audio. You dont need a broad internet connection, but you need a steady and a low-latency connection. My bandwidth usage is about 70 kbit/sek and latency is about 50 milliseconds and that work great! I get excellent audio reports. 

Software I use…:

Remote control the computer in the shack: LogMeIn (http://www.logmein.com – free program!)

Sound transmission:  IP-Sound or Skype  (also free)

Rig Control: Ham Radio Deluxe

A little notice. You can use Ham radio deluxe in server/client mode, but I prefer LogMeIn. That way I have full control over the computer in the shack. My experience with Ham radio deluxe in client mode is a little extra latency delay when triggering the PTT port. 

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