Hmm... I'm thinking about ways I can have a base station and control it from different locations. Like have a base station in one building and, either using some kind of low-power local repeater setup OR linked between devices or a PC/smartphone on the LAN(the building where I want my shack is already wired to the house with gigabit ethernet). I've linked a radio to echolink in years past but it would be really cool if I could actually change frequencies and such remotely too.
I've also wondered about setting up a solar powered repeater station up on my deer stand which is on the highest ground level on the property and then 3 levels high.
There's a number of ways to remotely control rigs these days, some of the newer rigs, have it built in via Ethernet ports. I talked to a guy on 6m a while back who's house was in the Carolinas somewhere and he was at the beach talking to me from a headset on his laptop.
There's some companies that offer it as an "all in one" box and others you'd have to create an audio path, a PTT path, and then have remote control software for the rig front face. It gets a LITTLE more challenging if you need to have remote control of an off-board tuner or your rotor, then you need versions of those that have some way to do that, or make up something homebrew. There's also some kits for some rotor controllers that'll sit inside them and add ethernet or serial control.
Of course, if your tower is big and where you live is windy, you probably want a weather station or at least a remote anemometer to see if you're willing to even hit the unlock button on the rotor... hahaha... and that can be done, too... weather underground and a weather station... and some folks might add an IP camera looking at the tower to make sure the freaking thing didn't blow over, rotor let go and start pretending it's a sideways windmill, or other "bad things"...
So rotor control can be "problematic" but is "do-able"... if you're just using multiband long wire antennas on HF or whatever... something that doesn't need tuning, they make remote antenna switches and tuners that will auto-tune and you can check their status... or use the tuner in the rig, if it has one, via that remote software...
Something like Ham Radio Deluxe for the rig control, and then add on from there... getting a voice path up to the mic jack remotely can be as easy as making your own streaming server and using VOX on the rig, or making up some way to PTT it remotely... a couple of my rigs have MOX buttons (not VOX) that can be "pushed" from the HRD software, so that would work too... just click the mouse and start talking...
All depends on how fancy you want it or how DIY... for remote rig control. Honestly I'd probably stick a windows machine in the shack with two monitors, stick HRD on one, and any other controls or digital mode/logging/whatever stuff on the other monitor, and just VPN to the house and do RDP to that box... let it do all the "stuff" there locally. Downside might be if I lost connectivity while transmitting... so a rig-based PTT timeout or some other PTT timer might be in order... just to keep it from getting "stuck" on-air using that cheesy remote control methodology. I'd have to think about how I would do audio, but probably a shoutcast server with a password somewhere, and a nailed up connection to a mixer board, that could be remotely manipulated...
