Remote CW Sidetone for RUMlogNG CW contesting using SmartSDR for Mac

cdhowe

Hi all,

The question of “How do I get CW sidetone when I use contest software remotely on a Flexradio?” comes up fairly often in these forums. The issue is that FlexRadio provides sidetone for CW via a headphone jack on the rig itself or will do so through its Maestro remote console (that will be $1600 please), but otherwise, you have to cobble together some sort of solution yourself, usually requiring the addition of an external WinKeyer or other standalone hardware that itself generates sidetone.

This solution is for those hams who:

* Operate ham radio on a Macintosh.
* Own a 6xxx series Flexradio transceiver. I believe this should work with pretty much any radio in the 6000 series, but I haven’t tested it with anything other than my 6600.
* Operate your Flexradio using SmartSDR for Mac and you’d like to do it remotely (i.e., not sitting next to the transceiver but rather operating from a Mac elsewhere on the internet)
* Want to operate in CW contests using the excellent RUMlogNG software by DL2RUM.

If this is of interest, I've written a detailed description of how to configure RUMlogNG and SmartSDR for Mac so that you can get local CW sidetone when using RUMlogNG in CW contests. Please note that this solution does not deal with connecting an iambic keyer to the mix, but the documentation for SmartSDR for Mac has instructions for doing that as well.

You can read the post at:

https://www.wg1v.org/posts/2024-02-19%20CW-Sidetone-for-RUMlogNG/

Chip Swett

Thanks, Carl. I have wrestled with the same problems. It all makes sense once you get it all working, but it takes a lot of trial and error. I appreciate your clearly written guide.

SmittyHalibut

If you'll forgive a bit of self promotion, I've just released a device specifically designed to help connect morse code paddles to a computer for remote CW operation:

https://electronics.halibut.com/product/halikey/

I've been working with Mike Walker on this for the last couple months. He's been doing testing for me.

frc2302

https://community.flexradio.com/discussion/comment/20609420#Comment_20609420

You can self-promote anytime, far as I'm concerned. I appreciate your contributions to the hobby (and to HRWB!). Most importantly, this is a rare example of a product which is more fully featured on Mac than on Windows - usually it's the other way around!