Remote Access to W2MMD Satellite Station

Below is a description of some early experimenting in making the W2MMD satellite station, with its excellent location and antennas, available to club members from their homes or other locations. A few of us are informally working on this project, but there's plenty of experimentation to be done, and plenty of room for others to join in. If you're interested in cooperating on this project, post a comment on this blog or email me at jon at pearcefamily dot org.

Here's some initial research into remoting access to this station.  We initially tried using a simple Windows Remote Desktop from within the clubhouse, but that seemed to crash the SCR Console program, plus we were concerned with the lack of bandwidth being a problem transferring the moving SDR image. So we decided to move to creating a VPN connection and finding client/server options for the SDR Console and PST Rotator programs. Below is how to set up the SERVER connection.

PST Rotator has a client and server configuration setting under the Communication menu in the Rotator screen, but I couldn't make a remote connection work (UPDATE - I got it working - see below).  I probably didn't have the server software running on the host computer and will come back to that later.

SDR Console (which is supported on the http://www.sdr-radio.com/Software/Version3/Server/ServerConsolehttp://www.sdr-radio.com/Software/Version3/Server/ServerConsole website) recently released a client/server version that can be downloaded here:

Under the Tools menu, see Server Manager

Under Accounts add users who can log into the server. This should be different for each user, and we'll add separate accounts for each callsign.

Under Radios, search for all of the radios that are connected to your computer. The W2MMD satellite computer has the Funcube Dongle installed, although we could install multiple dongles to allow multiple users to connect simultaneously.

There are also settings under "Network" that deal with compression and other network-related issues.  I haven't explored those yet.

Then install the service with the Install button.  Once it's installed you start and stop it with those buttons:

CLIENT RADIO SETUP

Here's how to set up SDR Console as a client to the server that's actually connected to the SDR radio and antenna. First, you need to be on the network of the server; at the clubhouse location this would mean being on the Wifi, but from a remote location you'll need to be on the yet-to-be-installed VPN. On your local installation of SDR Console, go to Select Radio, then Definitions:


From the Search popup select V3 Server at the bottom of the list. This should list all of the radios installed on that server.


Add the server IP address and the username and password set up on the server. You'll then see a list of the SDR radios installed on that server; select the one you want to use. Unless that radio is already in use you'll be connected to it and can now can control it from your client software.

Note the other server options - it appears to start the Server service whenever Windows is started which may not be desirable.

More to follow
Jon WB2MNF

Update 7/14/18 - the TCP client for PST Rotator works.  Run the server on the W2MMD satellite computer and the client on the local computer. Connect to the server like this:


Leave the TCP Client window open. I don't know how many different users can connect to the rotator server. Also note that there's no login - anyone who's connected to the network can control the antenna position.

Running the SDR client on a faster (i7) computer seems to be fast enough to provide streaming audio, although it might not be good enough for data, I've also noticed that the bandwidth selections for the radios on the remote consoles are lower than those at the server console, which may mean that the software limits the amount of IQ data to that which can fit over the available bandwidth (which would be pretty cool).  More to test...

7/16/18 - I took my more powerful (i7) laptop over to the station and connected it to the SDR Console server. Unfortunately it seems to show a large band of noise around the middle of the passband wherever it's tuned. That doesn't appear to happen on my home station.  Might have something to do with the bandwidth selected. Will require more research.

I also found that connecting a TCP client to the PST Rotator program will allow either the server or the client to set the antennas.  The rotator will respond to the most recent command, whether issued from the server or client. 




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