Software Defined Ham Radio: Remote Operation

With all the Hubbub over Maestro I decided to set up my radios on my LAN network. I wanted to give remote ops a whirl and see how all the hard work that went into this design paid off. My shack is at the farthest point you can get from my WIFI router. I have had at best fair to poor luck with the WIFI. There is a story about 2 guys sitting on a porch with an old hound dog. Every so often the dog would howl. The man asked the owner why that dog was howling. The owner said he's laying on a nail. The man asked why doesn't he move? The owner said it doesn't hurt enough yet! Well tonight it hurt enough for me.

My house doesn't lend itself to stringing wire, but I figured out a scheme that hid the wire for the most part. I ran it out of the wall and was able to tuck it into soffit and then into the garage attic where I could send it into the shack. Worked great! Here is the new topology of Flex aspect of my LAN

I of course have a million other things connected but from a FlexNet perspective I have 2 radios and a computer connected to a 5 port switch which then connects to the router via my new cable. I have outstanding speed on this. I was concerned the radios would not be correctly identified by the router but the DCHP picked them right up. Now when I connect to a radio I get this startup screen

I choose the 6500 in the shack on the shack computer and it fired right up and I could identify both radio's IP address in the router set up. The point of all this is to demonstrate how well behaved the networking is with the Flex radios.

I next downloaded 1.4.11 onto a remote wifi based computer.