Overseas Travel-Max latency tolreable

[VE6WZ]

My wife and I will be spending 2 months in Australia this winter and I am wondering if its worth bringing the RCC-Micro and other peripherals to connect to my remote?
Any one have experience with working a NA remote site from VK?
I have done a few random ping tests to Australia servers and I'm getting some pretty bad latency numbers...often 200 ms plus.
I'd rather not take all my hardware if its likely to be un-workable.

de steve ve6wz

[oz1rh]

I have worked remote from Dayton to my radio in Europe and I even worked another ham sitting in Chicago remoting his station also back in Europe, super DX from Copenhagen to Hamburg on 7 MHz I had to increase jitter buffer size, jitter delay and packet size in RRC Advanced parameters but it worked. Ping time was 100-200 mS. So bring your RRC and have fun.

My worst problem was getting a decent interconnection. I have been at places where the Wifi was so overloaded I could not even ping the default gateway (the ADSL-router) reliable.

If you are at a hotel where you have to enter a code/password on your pc your RRC might not be able to connect to the internet as the hotel check its MAC adr. which is different from your pc. Apart from changing the MAC adr. the trick is to use ICS = Internet Connection Sharing at your pc and then connect the RRC to the pc on the pc Ethernet port. The pc will then share its Wifi connection with the RRC trough the pc Ethernet port. Google 'Internet Connection Sharing' on how it is done. Note that bridging the two networks in the pc will not work, you need ICS.

At one hotel I found that the Ethernet cable in my room did not provide any DNS before entering the password. That was solved fast by entering the IP adr. of my radio site in the control RRC. I made quite a few QSO's smiling over their 'security'.

73, Palle, OZ1RH.

[VE6WZ]

Thank you Palle !!

Very good information which I will use on my travelling.
Maybe we will QSO VE to OZ when I am in VK !

73, steve, ve6wz

[VK6IA]

Hi Steve,

I have a remote rig station in Nottingham UK, based on an Icom IC706MKIIG remote head system and have no problems with access from here in Perth Australia.
Ping times are 380ms. 

Best 73
Andrew
VK6IA / G5AU

[VE6WZ]

Great news. Thanks for that info Andrew.
I will definitely be taking a laptop and the RCC-Micro now.

steve

[VE6WZ]

Update...I have been on holidays in VK now for 3 weeks and have had great success controlling my remote in VE6.

I am only using the 1274B dongle connected to a very cheap Dell notebook.
So far all QSO's on CW, and I am CW keying the radio using my L32 logbook program AT THE REMOTE by logging into the remote via TeamViewer and using keyboard cw. I have not even tried using paddles to send CW from my laptop, because I am doubtful it would be reliable.

Numerous DX qso's on 80m and 160m including working some DX-peditions using split. Many QSOs with VK stations....very strange to be working a VK station in Melbourne, using my home station in VE6 western Canada, while I am sitting on the coach in my hotel room in Melbourne!

Also, while in Tasmania (VK7) I did not have Wifi, but had complete and solid control of the remote while tethering my 4G data plan from my cell phone to the laptop. 100% solid audio and control.

I thought others would like to know that the significant latency introduced from VK to NA does not present a problem with the remoteRig setup. Quite amazing indeed.

de steve ve6wz.