My station
does a lot of remote operation. The
radio and control equipment is in a back room, near the entry point
for the antenna feedlines, while I prefer to operate from a more
comfortable part of the house. This works really well, but it
does require that I remotely monitor the transmitter, to keep an eye
on things like power and SWR levels.
Until recently, I used a
remote camera
to watch the front panel of the tranceiver on a
VLC instance or in a
web browser. This works fine, but it seemed like a lot of
data and bandwidth just to watch a meter. Further, it makes
off-site remote operation difficult, because of so much bandwidth
is required.
My digital mode software uses
rigctld
from
hamlib
to control the radio. That program also allows multiple
connections to a single radio. I used this feature to make
a very lightweight and low-bandwidth station monitor to replace
the webcam setup.
I chose a text-mode interface, because it could present all the
information that the radio LCD could show me, but it could do so
using very little bandwidth, and could also be easily run through
an SSH
connection if I want to operate away from home. Even when
operating through a cell phone data connection, the monitor would
consume very little data.
The software is written in
Python,
and the standard
ncurses
library to provide a nice text-based user interface.
Monitor Display
It uses the raw command support in rigctld to send custom
commands to the radio. The TS-590SG support in hamlib
is very basic and a little buggy, but rigctld supports a
'W' command, that sends raw commands and returns the reslt.
This allows any command to be used through rigctld, even if
it is not supported by hamlib. This also happens invisibly
to other programs connecte to rigctld, so it's safe to mix
in with other software like fldigi
or WSJT-X.
There's a lot of information available via the TS-590GS CAT
interface, but I chose the ones that I thought were important to
see, including:
Frequency (both VFOs) and Split state
S-meter and Power output
SWR and Compression levels
TX/RX state
Preamplifier and Attenuator
ATU and Antenna Ports
Noise Blanker state
These are scanned slowly and presented in a "wattmeter"
style in a terminal window or console.
This is a nice replacement to the webcam I was using previously,
and consumes far fewer resources. It is, unfortunately,
specific to the TS-590SG, because I used custom commands to
communicate with the radio.
Click the link above to download software packages. The source is being
released under the GPL version 3, which is also available on the download page.
