Operating Remote Receiver and Local Transmitter with Digital Modes

Over the past few years, many SDR receivers have been put online and can be accessed over the Internet. This allows one to monitor the bands from receive locations far from the operator's local area. This is very useful to determine if your signal is getting into an area. I have used it to monitor the Wyoming Cowboy Net from an SDR receiver in Sedona, AZ (http://w7rna.dyndns-remote.com:18901/).

It occurred to me that one could use a remote SDR receiver to counter problems with local noise. In order to test this concept, I've installed two programs on my Ubuntu 14.04 Linux box, as follows:

FLDIGI(1) - a powerful digital mode encoder/decoder program

PULSE AUDIO VOLUME CONTROL(2) - a software package that allows one to direct audio from various sources to various outputs.

Once these are installed, the web-based SDR receiver can be chosen from the site: websdr.org

The audio produced by the web page is routed, using the Pulse Audio application, to the FLDIGI software.

For my experiment, I connected to http://radman.no-ip.ca:8903/ (New Brunswick, Canada) and set the receive frequency to 14.070 MHz. There were many signals on the band and I was able to decode many, including SP6QKS (Poland), OK2MI (Czech Republic), F5POJ (France), and IU8ALH (Italy).

While I have a West Mountain Radio Rig Blaster Pro, I do not have it interfaced to my rig and have no plans to do so.

One other aspect of this method is the question of authenticity. When one operates an SDR receiver located in a remote area but transmits from a local area, does that bring into question the validity of the QSO? That is a question for another article.

REFERENCES:

1. FLDIGI on Linux
2. PULSE AUDIO VOLUME CONTROL

ADDENDUM

1. Working "split remote" will not work in contesting due to the delay. Much like Echolink in that sense. If you hear a station issue QRZ, your response will be too late.
2. As is often the case, messing with sound cards with multiple inputs and outputs, it is easy to mess things up. In my case, on Ubuntu 14.04, the sound system selected "Dummy Output" for an output. Thus, no audio from the speakers. Google to the rescue, offering this sequence of commands that fixed it: 

pulseaudio --kill
sudo alsa force-reload
pulseaudio --start