TS480 Now Remoted

Here is a photo of remote TS480 up in my loft.  True that the separation is perhaps 70 feet or so from my basement shack.  Everything has to work in the local network before  I proceed to remote it to many many miles away.

I had to dedicated most of the afternoon trying work out all the bugs:

(1) No connection - I had the wrong address in the SIP contact.   The ethernet port was flashing yellow indicating it was waiting for a connection

(2) Light on the ethernet port is solid yellow now.  I should be connected.   Radio won't turn on.   Well the RJ12 jumper I made was wired backwards.   I inadvertently wired the jumper correctly but it took several trials and errors to correctly identify it was the jumpers fault.

(3) It seems to be keying but no RF seems to get out.  I tried calling some Mediterranean stations that I should be able to work with 5 watts - no success.  I turned upo the wick to 80 watts.   The output meter indicated power and low SWR - what gives?  Well the keyer output from the Radio side RRC has to be connected to the Keyer input - straight key with a stereo plug - duh.  The Radio RRC gets its input from the built in Keyer in the Control RRC.  I now had to prove to myself that everything is working.

I worked 6Y, 5H, FJ stations all with 5 watts - now all is well

(4) Now comes the harder part, moving the control station 25 miles away to my parents house.  First I set up the router to see the RRC as a DMZ such that all traffic in and out will not be blocked by the firewall.   While I was at it, I put port forwarding to port 17152 for N4PY to work as a client-server.

Now - it is time to drive to Simpsonville armed with a Wifi router extender and the remote head, RRC control box, etc.