For control of the K3-line I don't think jitter and latency of the IP connection generally is a big problem. The Elecraft software for remote control of the KPA500 and KAT500 is very user-friendly. The difficult part for a CW operator is in producing nice CW and in obtaining a good quality CW audio. I have used RC for many years and think I have quite some experience for CW but very little for SSB.
I have been using K1EL Winkey Remote for a while and it's my impression that it is performing very well (basically similar to using a keyboard). It connects two winkeyers over IP and is described on K1EL website. Whereas I have heard quite many RemoteRig CW signals that sounded "odd" with occasionally dashes being way too long, I think I can truly say that a solution based on two linked Winkeyers will not have that problem (but it might have other problems). If someone has made a thorough comparison I would be very interested. There is a fundamental difference in the way the two solutions operate. The Winkey Remote is locally decoding and sending the character across the IP as a decoded character which is converted to a CW character in the Winkeyer connected to the rig. It will therefore only transmit a valid CW character (character set defined by K1EL). If you send an illegal character (by mistake or by sending some national special non-recognizable characters), the Winkeyer will output nothing but just writes an asterix in the decoded window. The keying will be indistinguishable from "keyboard CW", which may sound boring for some. If you keep ahead in the buffer, you can only insert space between characters (one space element) and between words (three space elements). If you want to insert a bit more space e.g. between sentences, you will have to let the buffer go empty. With some training you can make it sound fairly nice. And it gives you a good feeling of using a paddle for CW and of course the flexibility having eyes and one hand free while sending CW. I use an USB- Winkeyer in the shack (connected to a notebook) and a Winkey-compatible keyer from G3ZLP (half price). The solution is true low cost - unlike the RemoteRig. I have operated from OX-land with a ping time around 120 msec and from various places in OZ mostly with ping times about 20-30 msec. There is no big difference. The biggest contribution for the delay in CW comes from the decoding in the local Winkeyer - it is close to half a second and a bit annoying if you encounter a very eager/impatient CW operator. It is not for true QSK operation (even if you with the K3 can listen through your own sending). Maybe RemoteRig is superior in that respect. For the audio I use IP-Sound (which connects over a VPN) and can operate from 8 kbit (GSM or PCM coding) using about 16 kbit/s with a fine audio quality for CW. Much better than Skype. My friend Steph F5NZY says he has good results with using the VoIP in Teamviewer. I use Teamviewer for access (rig control) to the shack, but I do not get acceptable audio from Teamviewer VoIP. If the internet connection is such that you have drop-outs of the audio in Skype, I think you better forget about using any remote solution. I would be pleased to be proven wrong. I have no financial or other interest in any of the products mentioned above. /73 de OZ4UN Paul -----Oprindelig meddelelse----- Fra: Elecraft [mailto:elecraft-boun...@mailman.qth.net] På vegne af John K3TN via Elecraft Sendt: 16. juli 2014 12:39 Til: elecraft@mailman.qth.net Emne: Re: [Elecraft] How reliable an internet connection is needed for A K3 remote to work well? Barry - I've been playing around with a RemoteRig at K4VV, where Mike W0YR had set up remote operating using VNC and Mumble/Skype for audio. The performance of the Internet connection there (which is wireless) is pretty bad - audio dropouts making CW essentially impossible for any real contest. On the pingtesting, the latency sometimes is in the 45 ms range, sometimes in the 150 ms and occasionally even longer. It usually looks fine if you do a single pingtest, but do a ping test of 100 pings and you start to see the problem. So, I tried RemoteRig and with highly variable latency (high jitter) of the connection, the RemoteRig audio is no better than what we were getting on Mumble. The rig control works much nicer than the VNC approach, but the Internet connection just won't support usable remote audio for CW in a contest. For RTTY and SSB, good enough - but not for CW. The parameters you can change in RemoteRig include a lot of buffers and packet size changes. You can change them independently for the TX audio and the RX audio. I ran a test on the air with Shin JA1NUT, since he is a CW "purist" - he said my CW was odd, as he called it "every now and then you have a 'brainstorm'" - the variable latency would cause some CW sending buffering apparently. I could improve that on the TX side, but could never get the RX audio usable over that connection. So, now Rick AI1V is working with the wireless ISP to see if we can improve the Internet performance. As the folks from Microbit put it "RemoteRig can't replace lost packets." By the way, there is a beta version of the K1EL WinKey Remote software that gives you sidetone at the local WinKey - we've been using that to get around having to always do keyboard CW with the remote N1MM via VNC. 73 John K3TN -- View this message in context: http://elecraft.365791.n2.nabble.com/How-reliable-an-internet-connection-is-needed-for-A-K3-remote-to-work-well-tp7591154p7591235.html Sent from the Elecraft mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to p...@tele.gl ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
