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/

I hope this helps others who have run into this issue.

Carl, WG1V