Yep…I got it to work.

It wasn’t trivial, but it is working. My skimmer is located about 150’ from my shack, with the antenna (a Cushcraft R7) up on a 50’ tower. It is “remotely” located, as I am a QRO contester, and want it to still work during contests. It is very inconvenient to run some sort of wired Ethernet link to my skimmer, so I explored ways to do it via radio (we are hams, after all..).

My skimmer is in an unheated pole-shed in WI, so sees some pretty extreme temps. I have been running the skimmer in the pole-shed for 4+ years, but the environment is pretty harsh and have I had computer (and frequency stability) issues over time. A GPS disciplined LO for my QS1R fixed the stability problems, and a 802.11g Wi-Fi link got data to the shack. A lot better idea seemed to be running just the skimmer SDR in the shed and running the computing part of the setup in a nice cozy shack.

That wasn’t easy with my QS1R, as it ran off a USB cable. I recently upgraded to a Red Pitaya 16-bit SDR, which runs off an Ethernet link, so, if I could get a reasonably fast Ethernet link to my remote receiver, I would be in high clover.

That, however, was a significant challenge. The RP-16 is a promiscuous consumer of bandwidth. A fully commissioned RP-16 (sixteen 192 kHz slices) munches up 160Mbps. You ain’t gonna get that bandwidth out of an 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi link. Further complicating the issue is that a dead-solid Wi-Fi link is necessary, as Skimmer Server locks up on a data dropout and you have to go thru a fairly tedious reboot sequence to get it QRV. Both Skimmer Server and WSJT-X also get very deaf if they don’t get the full 10 Mbps/slice connectivity.

It is possible to make it all work, though. A relatively new (~5 years old) Wi-Fi standard called 802.11ac, featuring “Gigabit” speed is available at a reasonable price. I bought a couple of Ubiquiti NanoBeam 5AC Gen2 antenna/radio modules for a reasonable price from Amazon. They form a transparent RF Ethernet bridge from the shack to the shed.

I put Gigabit in quotes above as that is advertising Bravo Sierra. With the 2 antennas 6” apart, I could get ~650 Mbps thruput. I can, however get the same thruput 150’ away. I can get 450 Mbps thru a window, which oddly enuf, attenuates the link by 20dB. Either speed is plenty, though. Some folks claim a 9 mile path works with these devices. I would not plan on 650 Mbps at that range though.

So yah…You can run a RP-16 SDR remotely and connect it to the mothership via Wi-Fi, if you do it right.

73,

Ted

K9IMM