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

[Lynn W. Taylor, WB6UUT]

Mike,

Think of it as tuning up on top of an existing QSO.  You're using 
Google's bandwidth, but not in any way that supports Google.

If lots of people "tune up" on top of Google, they have to address the 
unwanted traffic, or throw money at the problem (buy more bandwidth).

Courtesy suggest that you can dial off a bit, and still "tune" just fine.

A traceroute from my workstation goes through Verizon DSL, through 
Alter.net (belonged to MCI last I knew) and then to Google's network -- 
11 hops through 3 networks.

Pinging Google means I'm measuring the performance of ten routers, 
Google's web server, and the wires in between.

So let's say I'm measuring loss between here and Google, and it's at 
Alter.net.  I call them and say "your network is dropping packets" and 
they say "can I have your customer number?"  If I call my provider 
(Verizon) they refer me to their SLA (Service Level Agreement).  This is 
a consumer DSL line, so the SLA says "provisioned casually" which is 
internet-speak for "we promise that it might work some of the time."

If you're trying to figure out the performance of your connection (and 
diagnose/fix problems) you want to know what happens in the first few 
hops.  You want near zero packet loss and low latency and jitter, and 
you can work with someone you pay if there is an issue.

Beyond that, you can only hope.

Speaking as someone who ran an ISP for a couple of decades, I'm most 
interested in the first router past my facility.  Looking at the 
traceroute to Google, the 1st is my local router, 4th hop answers ping, 
the 5th doesn't respond to pings at all, and the 6th belongs to someone 
other than Verizon.  I'd ping the 2nd or 4th.

Does that help?

73 -- Lynn

P.S. I'm not a big fan of Google, but the same applies to MSN/Microsoft, 
Yahoo!, or any other well-known site that is likely to be up at all times.

On 7/26/2014 3:37 AM, Mike va3mw wrote:
> Huh?
>
>> On Jul 25, 2014, at 12:43 PM, "Lynn W. Taylor, WB6UUT" <KX3 at ColdRocksHotBrooms.com> wrote:
>>
>> If you're going to ping something, do a traceroute and ping a router a few hops into your provider's network, or ping something like your provider's web server.
>>
>> When you choose to ping something like Google, it tells you about your provider's network up to the first place they can get rid of your packets, and every other network up to the Google server.
>>
>> The reason you want to look at something close is that you can either control it yourself, or you can complain about it to someone you pay.  When you ping Google, your provider's SLA will carefully explain that they don't control the whole internet, and aren't responsible for anything beyond their own network.
>>
>> 73 -- Lynn
>>
>>> On 7/25/2014 8:02 AM, W5UXH wrote:
>>> But if not one could still use it to track
>>> problems that are at the first few hops by monitoring other servers like
>>> google etc.
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