[Elecraft] How reliable an internet connection is needed for A K3 remote to work well?

[John K3TN via Elecraft]

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



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