Add remote CW capabilities to the good old famous Junkers Key.
Motivation
With the availability of high-speed internet, it is very easy to remote your home amateur radio station as described in section 24.4 of the ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications 2020. As a fan of the famous Junkers key I could not find a solution which will allow for remote operation of this device. I've seen several solutions with Rig control software allowing to enter text which then will be sent in CW mode by the Rig, CW generated by the computer. For a CW fan like me this sounds unathletic no longer needing a key. As I could not find a solution which would allow me to remotely use my Junkers key, I started this project.
Requirements
On the remote location, allow to connect the Junkers key. The home station has a female connector for a Key, the solution has to provide the remote signal the same way as if I would connect the Junkers key directly to that station. Transmission of CW over the internet, the solution has to support lower WAN speeds with higher latency.
Solution
The solution uses RS232 Serial ports on Windows computers at the remote location and the home station location to connect the Junkers key at the remote location and the remote computer to the CW connector of the remote station. The Junkers Remote Tool is running on both the remote computer and the home station computer, transmits the CW signal over the internet and replays it to the remote station into the CW connector.
Hardware and Software requirements
Hardware:
At the remote location: Junkers key, USB2Serial (RS232) Adapter, a custom cable to connect the Junkers key to the RS232 interface, a Windows Laptop with internet access.
At the home station: USB2Serial (RS232) Adapter, a custom cable to connect the RS232 interface to the Key connector at the Rig, a Windows Laptop with internet access.
The diagrams for the cables are available here.
Software:
The home station shall be reachable via DNS, an IP address and port forwarding needs to be defined to the Windows computer running Junkers Remote (Jure), which can be downloaded here: https://github.com/SrMaker/Junkers-Remote
