September 22, 2026
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| KB7Q Remote EME station version 1.0. Lots of tie-wraps/cable clamps to keep it neat. |
The land owners of the barn where I operate my 23cm moon bounce station just extended their house Internet to cover the barn. Eureka! Now I have what I need to run my station during those cold winter Montana nights from the comfort of my condo's den. The trick was to figure out a way to do this without messing with the land owner's router ie no port forwarding. I also wanted to keep it cheap and simple.
The first step was to figure out remote power control to boot the station and shut it down safely. I've been using Kasa HA103P2 smart sockets to control our emergency space heaters for back-up if the condo furnace goes out while we're away. They're rated for 15 amps, so that should cover things nicely. I installed one to turn the computer on, and a second to power up the rest of the gear. There is a Kasa app for smartphones and there is even an app for my desktop PC. Setup was about a four step process to get the smart sockets talking to the barn's Wi-Fi.
To make things easy to trouble shoot and get some desktop space I mounted the 48 vdc supply, the 13.8 vdc supply, and a heavy duty power strip onto a plywood panel and attached it to the wall behind the operating desk.The 13.8 vdc PowerPole distribution block is mounted to the top of the 13.8 vdc supply.
In planning this out I soon realized that my trusty laptop computer with its measly three USB ports wasn't going to cut it. I bought a mini-computer with six USB ports and used them all! I was shocked at how much computer you can get these days for $300. A bonus was a much bigger monitor v. the 15" screen on my laptop for when I'm on site operating.
Putting the ports to work
one USB B/C cable for the IC-9700 radio
two USB A/A cables for the Green Heron AZ/EL controller
one USB A/B cable for the WaveNode wattmeter
one USB C/C to power the Bodnar GPS with 5 vdc.
one USB A has the wireless transmitter for my mouse/keyboard
So how do I get remove access to the far end computer to run the show? In a word - RemotePC. I've used TeamViewer and AnyDesk before, but over time they've become more and more expensive. TeamViewer even goes out of their way to hassle casual users. RemotePC works great and the price is reasonable. So understand I'm using RemotePC to see and control the remote PC's desktop. All the operating software like WSJT-X, BKTimeSync, PSTRotor, and the WaveNode app are started and run on the remote computer.
In the remote computer's BIOS I set the computer to boot upon power up. That way I can completed shut the station down and bring it back to life easily with the KASA smart sockets.
The one challenge that took some research was how to get the IC-9700 transceiver to turn on/off? Both free WFView and for pay Win4IcomSuite will send the proper CAT command via the USB cable and wake the radio up. WFView is quite crude but gets the job done, Win4Icom Suite is highly polished and to me well worth the $60.00. Win4IcomSuite allows me to adjust radio parameters if required. Thankfully other than frequency changes, most settings are pretty static for EME operations.
So what are the limitations of my installation? With just a single USB connection to the radio I need to use WFView or Win4IcomSuite to start the radio and then close out to free up the USB port so WSJT-X can have it. To shut down the radio I reverse the process.
While RemotePC does ship the rig's monitor audio remotely. I really don't need to send or receive audio. I'm a small EME station running digital Q65 mode on the remote computer. I can see the waterfall and spectrum window easily, as well as the decodes. The remote WaveNode software lets me monitor power out and SWR.
While I could drop WSJT-X and jump back to Win4IcomSuite to change frequency when chasing a station, I discovered WSJT-X will change the rig's frequency if you enter the last three kilohertz digits in the SKED field found in the Astronomical Window. Slick!
The plan is to work the ARRL EME contest from my warm, bright den. We'll see how it goes.