GazEm over the Internet

Nope.

Gaz Emulator, along with SockMon, uses a subset of the TCP/IP protocol called UDP. UDP is a stateless, connectionless broadcast protocol. Way convenient, extremely fault tolerant, requires almost no overhead, but it is insecure, so Internet infrastructure & backbone routers have it trapped out. The cheap-o routers and switches most of us use (Linksys, D-Link, etc) have UDP pass-through enabled, but if you ever buy a really high-quality industrial-strength programmable switch or router (Cisco, for example), it will almost surely have UDP broadcasts disabled by default.

If you're ambitious, you can buy a pair of serial-to-TCP/IP protocol converters to accomplish what you're trying to do, but it'll be sticky and finicky due to Internet security issues. Both ends will have to have a static, routable IP address and either no firewall or a carefully configured firewall with forwarding set up correctly. I can give you the socket numbers TT*Ware uses if you want to try that.

Depending on the distance you're talking about, you'd be better off using directional, amplified "Pringle's Can" WiFi antennas to add the display site to your LAN. You can shoot those things up to around a mile, but they're not cheap and they have to be bolted to the side of a building & carefully aimed. One of my customers, The Australian Open, uses a rig like that to broadcast live tennis scores via WiFi across the main railroad tracks in downtown Melbourne from Rod Laver Arena to the player hotels. It's pretty cool. Obviously, if you're talking about broadcasting data from Telluride to Moscow, that's not an option.

Another option is contracting with a video shoutcast company to shoutcast a video image of Gaz Emulator over the internet. You can hook up a scan converter to your Gaz Emulator PC and feed it to them as live video. This type of service is getting pretty reasonable, price-wise, these days, and such companies have the mirroring & bandwidth infrastructure to handle the loads it pulls.

Thanks for the background on protocols. Being that there are many ways to extend a local network I will be utilizing those methods in the near future. On a related note, when using sockmon to drive a display on the network, where do you select the com port the display is connected. Do you need to do this with TTware installed in the same directory with the com port for gaz selected acordingly?

Good question. D'oh! Evidently I never installed the COM port forwarding redirect into the TT version of Sockmon.

Why not? I have no idea, probably a combination of (a) nobody ever asked for it, and (b) I never had to use it for an event myself.

Give me a few days and I'll get you a copy of TT Sockmon with the COM port redirect installed.

In the meantime, if you need to test, you can use Sockmon for V2 (Veloresults) or for my DTK ski racing product, they both have the redirect installed and use the same IP socket (29001) for GAZ as TT uses.

When you set up any of those versions of Sockmon, the EXE will create a little control file in whatever directory you run SockMon from, to store your COM port forwarding selections.