How to schedule users

We are getting ready to use wfview to allow hams in our senior living community to operate a 7300 and attic antenna from their apartments. Our community is one of 24 operated by the same company (Erickson) and only a couple of the facilities have ham antennas. If we can get our remote operation working well, at our community (Ashby Ponds), we would like to open up our setup to the many hams in the other communities. This would allow those hams to once again get on the air.

My question is, does anyone know of good (hopefully free) software that would allow us to schedule the use of our remote shack. It would be beneficial if the process was done automatically, so that one of our club members doesn’t have to baby sit the operation.

Thanks Much - Kent – KA4FIX on behalf of the Ashby Ponds Radio Club.

Hi Kent,

I admire your mission.

All I can say is that nothing short of shutting off the server would get me signed out on time if the DX was rolling in! Good luck!

With that said, you really could do a cron job to reboot the server every hour (or at any schedule really), which would get the guys disconnected. But boy will your users be annoyed! Assuming the server starts up automatically on reboot, this would do the trick. Look up “cronjob linux reboot schedule” and you’ll find people discussing how to do it. There are probably even GUIs or web-based things that can help with scheduling cron jobs, possibly “webmin”. Been ages since I looked at webmin…

–E
de W6EL

Thanks so much Elliott. Hopefully we can get some cooperation from these old guys (me included). We just have to give it a try.

Kent
KA4FIX

Hi Kent
A friend sent in this suggestion - RemoteHams does a decent job of it but for direct connections, coordinating with Slack seems to be the best bet.
73
Dan KB4BOQ

Thanks Dan. I will give it a look.

Kent
KA4FIX

Hi Kent,
I am running a remote Station for a couple of friends as a part of our contest station. Let me give some thoughts on this.

I would do the scheduling outside of HamRadio. Slack, as Dan mentioned, could be an option. We do it with a Telegram Group. If somebody has a plan to use the station at a specfic time (for a sked or so), he will announce this in that group. If not, we work first come, first use.
If there is something strange or wrong, it will be announced in the group. If the contest station (other adios, amplifier, etc) is in use or the antennna will be switched of for any reason, it will be announced as well. We do this now for nearly a year and it has worked without any conflict.

When you are responsible for a remote station, you do want to know, who is using it. The IC7300 has a very useful disadvantage :slight_smile: : you need a computer next to it to run WFView on it as a server. We use a cheap Raspberry Pi and I have configured it as a multiuser machine. That has two big advantages.
A) everybody needs to have an account on that machine. So we know, who is taking part.
B) every user has its own individual configuration. Important for WFView CW Macros, i.e.

A typical flow of starting the station is as follows:

  1. power on the rig & connect the antenne, done via remote accessible switches (the raspberry is runinning 24/7)
  2. starting VNC locally and connect to the VNC Server of the raspberry
  3. login with your individual user and power up WFView, switch on the IC7300
  4. start a WFView Client on your local machine to get some sound
  5. have fun

After that it gets different. There are guys who are only interested in SSB, they stay with 5) Others work digi modes or CW. For that there is an installation of FLDigi and WSJT-X locally on the raspberry, again with individual configs per user. So both programs could be used via VNC. That is good, when you have a bad/slow internet connection locally, because you have nearly no problems with latency.

However it is possible (and used) to work with NIMM or WSJT-X locally, just needing the WFView Server for the radio connection.

So with this setup we have all options and it works perfect. Thanks to this really great WFView software. Without that, it would not be possible.

Thomas, DL3EL

1 Like

Thomas, thank you so much for responding. You have given me a lot of useful information. When we get a little farther along, I hope I can ask you more about your process.

Thanks Much and 73

Kent
KA4FIX

Not sure how it is setup but I have seen some nets use Google Calendar to schedule controllers. They set it up so it can be viewed on the internet remotely and controllers can log on and make changes.

You have to set up a google account it do this.

Google Calendar - Week of 27 January 2025

73 . . Ken - VE5KC

Thank you so much Ken. Sounds like something that might work.

Kent
KA4FIX