For any of the members that have been following these posts, you’ll know for the past while there have been multiple issues with the stations in our VHF/UHF Allstar repeater network & it has been running in a reduced configuration for about 2 weeks now in an attempt to isolate the problem. From the log files it could be seen that VO2WL had a fair bit of traffic over the 2 weeks & that there were a number of “One Off” issues that did show up in the logs, but mostly would only appear for a few seconds and didn’t seem to interfere with the traffic, as there were no reports of any disruptions or interference.
Last evening at around 5:30, the entire network went offline, and remained like that until it was discovered early this morning & was rectified by rebooting the wifi router at the club. Later, just past noon today, We trapped a Ghost at the club! It was 10 meters tall, ran around the shack at 28.1 MHz and spoke in dots & dashes with 50W of power…. Hmmm, don’t those numbers sound familiar…
Working with VO2NS (Naz), we discovered that the old Linksys Wifi router is very cranky when 10 meter CW is floating around, even at QRP levels. While NS operated the Key, (& even squeezed in a few QSO’s) the router, at times as if on command from the CW key, would do anything from loose a few packets, to reset, to completely lock up & have to be rebooted. Probably explains the irregularity of the issues we’ve been having the past while. We did check other bands but we only seen it happen in the lower end of the 10 meter band.
Does anyone out there have an old WiFi router capable of “single port forwarding” lying around that we could borrow to do some further testing before the club invests in a new one? We suspect that the problem might be specific to the Linksys router there now, as it took a fall off the shelf around the same time all these strange problems started.
VO2WL is back in normal operation with the RF side enabled again & all the resource hungry debugging turned off. If you observe any unusual behavior from VO2WL, leave a comment below or e-mail with the time of the incident so we can compare to Naz’s HF logs 🙂
I don’t think this is the only issue we’re having with the VHF/UHF repeaters, but it is the most significant find so far.
73,
de VO2GO