[Elecraft] Advice needed: Remote Station Enhancement

[Rick Tavan]

I do miscellaneous switching chores at my remote station with two devices:
a remotely-controlled AC power strip and a remotely-controlled DC relay
board. Either could be adapted to your requirements IF your switch has
digital inputs such as four independent control lines. I don't know if
either of these techniques is what you really want, but maybe they'll give
you some ideas.

My AC power strip is from Digital Loggers Inc. I found it at a surplus
store for a lot less than new boxes. It supports eight controllable AC
outlets from a Web page that's hosted inside the outlet strip itself.
Connect it to your remote LAN with a little well-documented, one-time
network magic and you're good to go. You can assign mnemonic names to each
outlet, subdivide them into "user" and "administrator" sets, monitor access
via a "heartbeat" on the Internet for restart sequencing, etc. Quite nice
but not exactly what you want as you would have to plug in wall warts or
external relays and you would have to activate the four lines manually, one
at a time. To change antennas you would probably have to turn one off and
another on which is kind of messy.

My DC relay board is from Velleman Projects. It has a local interface
program (Windows) that I access via a remote desktop app. It has eight SPDT
relays but only exposes the common and normally open contacts via a
terminal strip. I've considered tacking wires onto the normally closed
contacts and adding a second terminal strip to expose them, but so far
haven't had to do that. They probably have other models with different I/O
capabilities. Although this device, like the power strip, provides eight
independent, binary lines, its local interface program is written in Basic
and source code is available. I wanted to re-program it with mnemonic names
instead of just numbers 1-8 but when I saw the Gothic environment into
which Basic has devolved, I gave up. If you're handier with Basic, you
could use the supplied source code as education and write your own program
that turns on one and no more than one line at a time.

There are other vendors of similar devices. I believe there are also some
solutions involving remote serial ports but I have no experience with them.

Good luck & 73,

/Rick N6XI

--

Rick Tavan
Truckee, CA

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 5:30 PM, Dennis Ashworth <dennisashworth49 at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Question #2 remains. How do I remotely switch between 4 positions on an RX
> antenna switch (e.g. K9AY switch box) via some kind of Windows based UI.
> Ideas?
>