Having both a remote station which is 100% home brewed and also having
done some contesting at W4AAW the M/M remote contesting station these
are easy enough to overcome.
In a contest which is what after all contesting software is used for
there is no need what-so-ever to use a paddle and little reason to deal
with sidetone either. Nearly all is handled with preset buffers sent by
function keys or by keyboard entry if necessary. I did a brief test in
SS CW using Writelog remote. The first QSO with Randy 5ZD didn't come
off very well as he asked for a repeat of something and I didn't have
the messages setup correctly. But we did get the rather complicated
exchange done in any case.
Most went flawlessly.
Same situation with another recent test when I worked Chris KL9A who was
in TI. He presented at the local club and said it was no problem
copying my call at 50. So I hit the old increase speed to 50 and volla
Chris of course QSL'd all. There are few that can copy WS7I at 50 WPM.
Barry W2UP, and Trey KKN and a few others to include Chris.
Having a latency adjustment like RemAud has is a great idea and pretty
much handles slow pings. My ping to w4aaw who is in Virginia is 110
which is fairly horrible. Yet easily adjusted out. Writelog has its
compression setting on the control site side.
One note is that when you have lurkers on your audio stream it really
eats up the audio which we have found at W4AAW.
Writelog's new interface is awesome for the radio's that it supports.
Looking forward to seeing more on the SW12! As I may need to implement
that as my switching is rather strange at my remote.
Jay WS7I
On 12/3/2018 4:22 PM, Joe Subich, W4TV wrote:
> The big difference between the two designs is that
> a) WriteLog accomplishes the sound-to-internet interface requiring
> Windows PCs on both ends, while
> b) RemoteRig requires a dedicated hardware device at both ends.> It
is reasonable to guess that the dedicated hardware would never
lose out, quality-wise, to the general purpose PC hardware. But at
that point you can't guess you have to actually test and find out.
The real difference will be in the available level of compression (to
handle bandwidth limited links) and *latency* in that compression.
The question is whether general purpose PCs can equal dedicated hardware
optimized to prioritize compression with low latency.
The other issue will be CW performance ... latency between paddle
closures and CW output as well as remote (from the rig) vs. local
(from the operator's PC/keyer) sidetone. Significant sidetone delay
(remote source) makes sending manual CW difficult. Excessive latency
(combined audio latency and paddle closure to RF output) makes "timing
a pile-up" an issue.
Some of the delays are within the control of the hardware/software
developer (processing/compression latency) while some are not (network
delays - aka. "ping time").
73,
... Joe, W4TV
On 2018-12-03 6:47 PM, Wayne, W5XD wrote:
On 12/3/2018 1:13 PM, Tom Georgens wrote:
If Wayne can match the audio quality of the Remote Rig, this is the
best and cheapest solution.
On this comparison between RemoteRig and WriteLog Remote Control, I'll
say up front I do not know whether one design has a fundamental quality
advantage over the other. I take this opportunity anyway to comment on
the differences between the two architectures.
At the conceptual level, the two are trying to accomplish the same task
for audio. To summarize: take RX audio at the remote station, digitize
it, pack it into a standard internet-ready form, and get it through the
internet interface at the remote (cable router, fiber, what-have-you),
out onto the open internet. Reverse the process at the control site to
make it audible to the operator. The mic audio for SSB is very similar.
It differs only in details like flowing in the opposite direction, you
never need more than one channel, etc.
The big difference between the two designs is that
a)WriteLog accomplishes the sound-to-internet interface requiring
Windows PCs on both ends, while
b)RemoteRig requires a dedicated hardware device at both ends.
It is reasonable to guess that the dedicated hardware would never lose
out, quality-wise, to the general purpose PC hardware. But at that point
you can't guess you have to actually test and find out.
But carefully consider the following details.
One advantage that the Remote Rig only appears to have, but might not,
is that modern rigs digitize internally and WriteLog gets its input from
such rigs over USB. For an example, WriteLog gets RX audio from a K3S
as-digitized by the rig and there is no reason, without testing, to
assume RemoteRig can do any better at digitizing. For such a rig any
quality difference comes down to a question of whether a Windows PC can
do a better job of getting the packet onto the internet (and undoing the
process on the remote end.)
WriteLog being on the Windows PC has to compete with what that PC might
otherwise think is a cool thing to be doing at the time (everyone's
favorite: upgrading Windows 10 when you least expect!) But, being on the
Windows PC, means certain mass market advantages might come into play:
like a $150 musician's USB interface that happens to do exactly what the
control site operator might need. It is reasonable to guess that such a
mass market device would do at least as good a job with audio at the
control site as the RemoteRig device does.
And, of course, there is always the problem of software quality. No
matter how good the hardware is for either design, does WriteLog
actually implement a transfer scheme that works in the real world as
well as RemoteRig? Someone besides me has to answer that question.
And please note I have carefully limited my comments here to the quality
of the audio transfer. If you're actually putting together a remoting
solution, you have to consider cost, ease of implementation, who besides
you might want to control your remote, etc. etc. etc.
Wayne, W5XD
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