Distributed Internet Multi-Op contesting

Roland HB9VQQ

I still remember the pain of my last cqww participation as SOAB. I was totally depleted after 48hrs contesting. Since quite some time I was thinking about a way to provide my station for a distributed Multi-Op contest (in my case Multi-single) over the internet like cqwwssb etc. and doing shifts with a Team mate and get myself a bit more sleep :-)

Station setup:

• Flex 6600
• Spiderbeam 40-10m on ANT1
• DXCommander 80-10m on ANT2
• PstRotatorAZ

I came up with this architecture based on SmartLink, N1MM+ (network mode) and ZeroTier SDWAN Technology. ZeroTier is free, very easy to implement and allows to create a private virtual (L2) LAN among Team members.

Yesterday I took the time for a Proof of concept. I had my local Station on my LAN already running and prepared a second Notebook which I connected to a Netgear Nighthawk M1, basically a mobile LTE Hotspot Router. I installed ZeroTier Agent, N1MM and PstRotator and configured everything. I made a short video of the result. This is a SO2R N1MM setup as you can see.

https://youtu.be/fL8p9vBClkE

It seems to work pretty well and recovers from failures like short connection problems transparently. More testing needed but looks promising so far.

If anyone likes the idea and is interested to testdrive the setup, pls let me know. It certainly helps if you are familiar with basic contesting and all the software packages involved. Config steps and help will be provided of course. It would be an interesting experiment for sure. There is still some time until Oct-24 ;-)

Roland, HB9VQQ