Thank You Recent Donors!

A lot has happened since the last update, including 3 significant donations to the club.

First, CRRS TV (our local cable company) board approved a donation of a Landline at the club, and to upgrade our internet access by providing a fiber to the club building. The fiber was installed & our internet access upgraded back in early May. The landline will be finished in the fall at which time, the CRRS tech will assist us in connecting our asterisk (ie. Allstar Nodes) servers to the phone network via VoIP. This should result in the ability to allow any (or all) of our Allstar nodes repeaters to have direct access to the phone patch via our internal network, without the need to Link any repeaters. Patch will be available to local RF users only with No Long Distance. Stay tuned for updates later this year. Thank you to all the CRRS techs, staff & BoD for all they’ve done to support HoWL!

Note: The old phone patch on the original VO2LMC repeater on Round Hill has been disconnected as of June 1. This repeater is no longer reliable as it is currently in the process of self de-commissioning 🙂

Second, RMS industrial services donated 2 desktop PC’s to the club, one for remote server for the Icom HF remote station & the other as a general club PC & backup for the HF remote. These Windows 10 PC’s were configured remotely by VO2CZ (Ben aka VO1ACZ) & with the help locally by VO2NS (Naz), the remote HF station went on the air back in late April. Thank You Ben, Naz & the folks at RMS for making this happen. Any members wishing to setup & use the remote HF station, contact Ben or Naz for assistance. This service will be limited to members & associate members with an Advanced/CW license only, which is a requirement to operate a remote HF station on any band in Canada. Basic with Honors does not qualify to operate HF remotely.

Third, CoNA (College of North Atlantic) also donated 2 desktop PC’s without Hard Drives, to replace our antique web server. The old server was running Debian 7, Wheezy (EoL was April 2016) on a 60Gb IDE Hard Drive & was constantly running low on HD space & crashing! The two new servers are running Debian 12, Bookworm on 480 Gb Sata SSD’s. For those in the Windows world, that is equivalent to upgrading overnight from Win XP to Win 11…, 6 generations! The 2 servers have been configured identically & will be continuously synced to allow for quick swap over in event of a primary server failure. As well as provide our regular web page, these servers are also contain databases of telemetry data from the entire HoWL network, live weather from our OpenWP weather Head (operating Most of the time:), our live Webcam on top of Smokey Mountain, and our Supermon AllStar Dashboard. Thank You to the staff at CoNA for the donation of these PC’s and allowing us to continue providing this web site. These servers were setup & configured by VO2GO (Glen).

Any Questions or comments, please post below.

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