So a couple of tests. First thing was to configure the Pi to us WiFi instead of my wired Internet. That turned out to not be terribly difficult. I had previously tried unsuccessfully to get the Pi 3 internal Wifi working without success. Apparently I hadn't tried hard enough. Turned out a little man page exploration and it took off.
But then I ran across a note on setting it up on the UDRC message board. Their way was a lot nicer than mine, so I tried it out and it worked fine.
One slick thing is that the configuration file lets you specify different priorities for different WiFi networks. So I added my cell phone's hotspot in at a higher priority. I then rebooted the Pi to force it to disconnect, and was able to validate that it had connected to the phone's network. That was actually a bit tricky because without another network, figuring out the Pi's IP address was a bit of a trail of bread crumbs. The phone seems to give out random IPs, unlike my router which assigns them sequentially making it easy to guess.
It seemed a little unhappy a first, but after a while it started to work fine. I worried about it at first, but then I realized that all the various gateways need to get comfortable with the new external IP. After a few minutes, everything worked fine.
I had a nice QSO with a station in West Virginia, throughout the repeater continued to report 0% bit error rate, audio was perfect, so as expected, it looks like the LTE is plenty good.
I got curious how resilient it would be changing networks, so I turned off the cell phone hotspot and almost immediately it reconnected to the home WiFi and picked up where it left off.
So it looks like an LTE connection will be quite reasonable. A lot of people use DVAPs and DV-Megas tethered from their cell phones, but I wanted to prove to myself that it was going to work with this hardware.
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