Is anyone a HAM?

[twistsol]

Way off topic and long winded.

My father in law is moving into an assisted living facility and while they are being as accommodating of his HAM equipment as possible; putting up a 60’ tower and a bunch of antenna’s there is out of the question though. I’ve heard that it is possible to set up a remote station so that I could house the amplifiers and antennae at our house, which is about three miles away. He should then be able connect his radio tuner etc. via the internet, phone, or short range radio and control them from his new living quarters.

Am I hallucinating? Can someone describe what all would be entailed in setting this up, and a ballpark cost. Are we looking a a few hundred, a few thousand, or many thousand dollars to accomplish this. Would housing the equipment in the wood shop be a really bad idea?

We are outside city limits and the hill behind the house is the highest point around for 30 miles in any direction. We have no homeowner’s association, and we’re on good terms with the township board. It would be accurate assume I know nothing of HAM radio other than what I've read on the internet in the past few days.

[woodturner]

Way off topic and long winded.

My father in law is moving into an assisted living facility and while they are being as accommodating of his HAM equipment as possible; putting up a 60’ tower and a bunch of antenna’s there is out of the question though. I’ve heard that it is possible to set up a remote station so that I could house the amplifiers and antennae at our house, which is about three miles away. He should then be able connect his radio tuner etc. via the internet, phone, or short range radio and control them from his new living quarters.

In many areas local clubs have already set up repeaters. If you can find a repeater in the area, he could access the repeater with a small whip antenna, and the repeater provides the greater power and antenna gain needed for longer distance and DXing.

Here is a list of repeaters http://www.artscipub.com/repeaters/s...tate=Minnesota

[LCHIEN]

I'm not a ham nut i have been around qutie a few in my life and am an electrical engineer.
I believe that it would be possible to set up a station at your house with an antenna suitable for DXing if that's what he wants to do. The next problem would be connecting remotely. A telephone could be "patched" to the ham rig. A patch is a simple piece of equipment that connects to the phone on one side and to the mic and headphone jack of the raio on the other. There are probably fully electronic patches that can even answer the phone and some acoutically coupled patches that have to be manually attached.

The problems then are:
1. phones are full duplex (meaning both sides can talk and listen at once), ham radio is half duplex meaning you can usually listen and then you have to press and hold a "PTT" key to talk which is why ham operators say "over", so the other person can know when they can key their mic and talk. So a keying mechanism is required at his end and the "PTT" key has to be operated remotely. This might be done by using touch tone keys and a touch tone decoder built into the patching equipment.
2. the radio probably needs to be off when not in use, a remote control might be handy. Not sure if Ham license requires an operator to be physically present or just in control.
3. If he're the tinkering kind of ham (e.g. modifying and tuning equipment all the time) then this might not work, but if he just lieks to talk, then it wold be great.


Probably getting on a Ham operators web site might be more helpful. The key word when searching will be "phone patch". Be sure and specify what band and if your Dad wants to DX. traditional phone patching would be using 2 ham stations to connect to phone lines at either end. Be sure and specify that it would be a one-ended phone connection. These days to would probably be not to difficult to use internet voice communication from a computer at your dads to a computer at your moe to the ham station. There are some requiements that ham stations be controlled by a licensed ham, so the inernet applicaiton might also include some contols to monitor and control the radio.

Phone patches are used less today than before because of cell phones and such.