The final tweaking of the nodes took place successfully today and the nodes are now running at 100%, as was proved by several caliber QSOs this afternoon.
Points to note: timeout is four minutes on both the IRLP and Echolink nodes – five minutes using RF-to-RF through GB3OA repeater. If you exceed the time on Echolink the link will be disconnected.
The nodes will be off-air this lunchtime for final tweaking of the equipment. You will still be able to come in to Echolink from your phone, but it won’t be going anywhere, just into a 50ohm resistor 🙂
As usual, GB3OA repeater and the Shoutcast stream are not affected.
As Saturday always seems to be the quitest day on GB3OA and the nodes, we’ll be taking advantage of this to replace some node equipment tomorrow, Saturday 29th September 2018.
The nodes will be off-air around lunchtime or early afternoon for what may be up to several hours i.e. until the nodes are performing again as normal.
This will not affect repeater RF use nor Shoutcast streaming.
The IRLP and Echolink nodes were off-air today between 12.00 and 12.20 UTC for backup of the software. This is performed monthly, with three months of previous backups available should the present software become unstable. Apologies to anyone who tried to use the nodes between these times.
After a small amount of reburbishmemnt of the mast and aerial the IRLP and Echolink nodes are again on-air. Please feel free to test them. But it can be a bit like ships passing in the night, so I suggest to those who automatically receive this GB3OA news that they test at 10a.m., 2p.m. or 5p.m. if they wish to have a QSO.
In other news: the part of Southport Pier that runs across the sea will be closed from October 1st until Christmas for refurbishment and construction of new attractions. This means that the Pier-to-Pier Challenge as detailed in previous news items will not be able to be accomplished during this period. Briefly, it entails a QSO between the end of Southport Pier and one of Blackpool’s via GB3OA. A small ham-related prize will be awarded for the first to achieve this.