Batboard

I would like to be able to monitor my vhf base radio from a remote office via the internet.

What software/hardware is needed for this.
Thanks

I have done something similar but over a private lan. We used a pc at the base station, with the line in of the pc sound card connected to the wireline output of the radio with a balanced to unbalanced 600 ohm matching transformer they sell at radio shack. Then I download the trial version of a program called VRS Virtual recording studio from the internet. It allows you to set up the line in left and right and the mic input all as seperate audio channels like a logging recorder, you can keep recording on the hard drive as mp-3's if you wish, and it will stream audio over a network. If you don't have a VPN or other existing lan connection and truly have to use the public internet you will have a problem because the ip address of the pc at the base station end will change and you need to know that address in order the connect with the remote monitor software fro your office. I'm sure there are other options, but that software has worked good for me, but I only used it for the thirty day trial.

Batwings21 wrote:I have done something similar but over a private lan. We used a pc at the base station, with the line in of the pc sound card connected to the wireline output of the radio with a balanced to unbalanced 600 ohm matching transformer they sell at radio shack.

A few words of caution about bridging the wireline control circuit.

An isolation trasformer, such as the Radio Shack one mentioned is essential. Do not conect the sound card directly to the wireline circuit.

If you use DC control a capacitor must be placed in series with isolation transformer connection to the wireline. Without the blocking capacitor, the transformer will shunt the control current and possibly keep the base from keying. Use a 250V NP electrolytic approximately 2-4 uF.

If you use Tone Remote, the capacitor is not necessary and no harm will be done to the radio control circuit by the bridged connection unless tone levels were very marginal to begin with. You may find the 2175Hz control
tone very annoying in the monitored audio and need to use a 2175Hz filter in the audio path to remove it.

I have not done any PC interface but I have used the Radio Shack transformers to feed radio system audio to customer's PA systems.

Batwings21 wrote:If you don't have a VPN or other existing lan connection and truly have to use the public internet you will have a problem because the ip address of the pc at the base station end will change and you need to know that address in order the connect with the remote monitor software fro your office. I'm sure there are other options, but that software has worked good for me, but I only used it for the thirty day trial.

won't have that problem if you have a static IP address, but i wouldn't reccomend leaving an unsecured system like that on an open IP.

Why not just load shoutcast server on your machine at home and stream it to yourself? Since you'll be the only user you can set the bitrate as high as your connection will stand... and it's free.

Or Skype works too - Just set the host machine to auto answer and only allows calls from people in your contact list. The best part is it doesn't require any port forwarding or server and the audio is truly real time with no noticeable delay. I use this to remote my BC796D from work along with Serproxy and HW Virtual Serial Port and ARC250 Virtual Control.

I use a program called Teamspeak to do mine over the internet, and we have other scanners from surrounding counties that are brought online sometimes too, so you can hear whats going on all over. Audio is realtime (well, within about 1 second) and is very good, even gives you indication of what scanner is receiving (kinda like a voting indicator). Site is at http://broadcast.lacledeoem.net