What if your entire ham radio station could follow you anywhere? In this interview, I sit down with Casey Stanton, K3SBP, the developer of POTACAT, and he walks through how his software turns almost any ham radio into a remote ready station you can run from your phone, a laptop, or a friend’s device.
POTACAT is free, open source ham radio software for Windows, Mac, and Linux, including ARM builds for the Raspberry Pi. It puts live POTA, SOTA, WWFF, DX Cluster, Reverse Beacon Network, and PSKReporter spots on one screen and one map. Click a spot and your rig tunes to the right frequency, mode, and CW offset automatically. When you make the contact, the log entry opens with the park or summit reference already filled in.
The remote side is called ECHOCAT, a companion app for iPhone and Android. Pair it with the POTACAT computer in your shack and you can work SSB with real time two way audio, send CW with a paddle plugged into your phone, run FT8 and FT4 with auto sequencing, send and receive SSTV, monitor JS8, and run WSPR beacons while you sleep. Your shack PC does the heavy lifting and your phone becomes the control head.
One of the biggest hurdles in remote ham radio is reaching your station from the road. If you’re on Starlink, cellular home internet, or an ISP that uses CGNAT, port forwarding simply won’t work. Casey explains how POTACAT connects over your local network, Tailscale, or the optional POTACAT Cloud relay so you can reach your radio without a static IP or opening ports on your router.
We also cover the Guest Pass feature, which lets you share your station with another ham for a set window of time. You choose their license class so band edges are enforced, cap their transmit power, set an expiration, and revoke access whenever you want. Station and control operator callsigns are recorded, and guest contacts log to their own logbook.
POTACAT supports over 300 radios through Hamlib, serial CAT, and native FlexRadio control, including the Icom IC-7300, Yaesu FT-891 and FT-710, Kenwood, Elecraft, and QRP Labs rigs. Logs stay in a local ADIF file and can forward live to Log4OM, DXKeeper, Ham Radio Deluxe, N3FJP, and Wavelog.
Whether you’re a POTA hunter, a SOTA chaser, a DXer, or a ham who just wants to get on the air from a hotel room or the school pickup line, this is a look at remote ham radio straight from the person who built it.
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