Licensed in 1959, at twelve #
ALAMO belongs to Marvin “Ed” Ireland, K5YZW. Ed was first licensed in 1959 at the age of twelve, and years later recovered the original callsign — which is not a thing that happens often, and not a thing anybody gives up once they have it back.
He is a CW operator. Not a CW dabbler, and not somebody who runs Morse because the band is quiet: a member of CWops — the CW Operators’ Club — holding number 2290. That single fact shapes more of this station than any piece of hardware in it. A station built for CW has to be low-latency and honest about timing, because Morse is a rhythm and a delay is a mistake.
Sixty-odd years in, the question was never whether to keep operating. It was where to put the radio.
You cannot hang a longwire off a balcony #
Ed lives in an apartment in Fort Worth. That is the whole problem, stated as plainly as it can be stated.
An apartment gives you two things no amount of skill will fix. The first is noise: dozens of dwellings stacked around you, every one of them full of switching supplies, LED lighting, chargers and powerline adaptors, all of it raising the high-frequency noise floor until the weak signals you actually want simply are not there any more. The second is space, or the absence of it. A longwire wants a run measured in hundreds of feet. An apartment has a balcony.
So the bands were not difficult. They were closed. Not by regulation, not by propagation — by an address.
Leave the operator, move the radio #
The fix is to stop treating the station as one object. Split it: the operating position stays where the operator lives, and the radio and the antennas go somewhere quiet with room to stretch. The network carries everything in between.
Ed had known this for years. He had thought about it, read about it, and started down the road more than once — and then, like a great many FlexRadio owners who have had exactly the same idea, he had put it aside. Not because it cannot be done, but because the gap between “this should work” and “this works, reliably, when I am not standing next to it” is wider than it looks. Somewhere in that gap are the networking, the tunnels, the power control, the failure modes, and the fact that nobody is at the far end to unplug anything.
That is where most remote-station projects quietly stop.
A post on a forum, and an offer #
ALAMO exists because of a partnership between Ed, K5YZW, in Texas and Ian, VK1HF, in Canberra, Australia.
Ian had already built himself a remote HF station and had written it up in the FlexRadio Community forums — not as a theory, but as a working thing, with the parts named and the problems described. Ed read it. It was the missing piece: proof that the whole idea was achievable, by an amateur, in practice rather than in principle. Ian offered to help Ed build the same, and the two of them have been building it together ever since.
Ed loves seeing a quiet waterfall and how well the whole thing works. Ian gets to use Ed’s radio, from Canberra, while Ed is asleep.
That last part is not a joke, and it is not a small thing. Fort Worth and Canberra are almost exactly on opposite sides of the clock, so the station is useful to somebody around twenty-four hours a day. Two operators, one radio, no contention — because when one of them is on the air, the other one is in bed.
Both of them would encourage anyone reading this to go and find the same arrangement. A remote station is a large project for one person and a genuinely enjoyable one for two, particularly when the two are far enough apart to cover each other’s night. Find someone with the land, or someone with the skills, and build something neither of you would have finished alone.
A ranch at Graford #
The station lives on a ranch at Graford, in Palo Pinto County, out past the western edge of the metroplex near Possum Kingdom Lake. It is ranch country: low hills, big acreage, and a noise floor that sounds like somebody switched the receiver off.
The site has full mains power, which removes an entire category of problem before it starts — no solar budget, no battery to nurse through a cloudy week, no load shedding. The radio simply stays on.
Everything at Graford hangs off one Raspberry Pi, alamopi. It is the gateway for the site network and the only thing there that talks to the outside world. The radio and the antenna switch sit on a private LAN behind it and cannot be reached directly from anywhere.
Two antennas are up: a longwire — the antenna the whole site exists to make possible — and a fan dipole cut for twenty, fifteen and ten metres. Both land on a switch rather than on the radio, so which one is in use is a decision that can be made from Fort Worth. Or, at the right hour, from Canberra.
A Flex 6700 and an eight-port switch #
The radio at Graford is a FlexRadio 6700. It was chosen for exactly one reason: it was built to be operated from somewhere else. A conventional transceiver made remote is a project with a long tail of adapters and regret; a Flex made remote is just a Flex. It presents itself to the network, and FlexRadio’s SmartLink service does the rest.
In front of it is a 4O3A Antenna Genius — an eight-by-two antenna switch, wired to the radio’s second antenna port. Eight antenna positions, two radio ports; the Flex holds port one, and port two is spare, which is room to grow into rather than a plan.
The switch is what makes the site a station rather than a single wire in a field. Changing bands from Fort Worth means changing antennas from Fort Worth, and that has to work without anybody driving out there.
Two machines and a tunnel #
The site cannot be reached from the internet, and that is deliberate. Instead alamopi dials out to a small virtual machine in a Dallas data centre — the exit node — and holds a private WireGuard tunnel open to it.
The exit node has the fixed public address that a ranch does not. It terminates the tunnel, serves the pages you are reading right now, and forwards the traffic that needs to reach the paddock. Round trip between the two is roughly twenty-four milliseconds, which is well inside what CW can tolerate.
It also means there is exactly one door into the site, it only opens outwards, and it is the Pi that decides to open it.
RS1 — the same build, written down #
What Ian built for himself, and then again for Ed, is being turned into something other people can use. The design has a name now — RS1, Remote Station Mark 1 — split into an RS1.Core and a set of RS1 modules that add the pieces a given site needs: power control, telemetry, antenna switching, site monitoring.
Ian is in the process of releasing this as an open-source project with freemium offerings, so that the next person who reads a forum post and thinks “I could do that” does not have to rediscover the whole thing from first principles. The fully-engineered, turn-key commercial version is documented at 1zulu.com.au.
ALAMO is one of the stations the design is being proven on.
What this site is for #
These pages are the station’s instrument panel. The story and the telemetry are public, because there is no harm in anyone seeing whether the radio is up. The pages that can change the state of real hardware — the remote-on line, PTT, antenna selection — are behind a login, and are marked below so nobody is sent at a door they cannot open.