It seems some picking up the Air Show relay from shoutcast.com are having problems, and others not. This will be taken up with Shoutcast itself by the GB3OA Repeater Keepers.
For now, try Shoutcast and if there is a problem receiving the stream go to The Stream page on the GB3OA website and enter the given IP address into VLC as instructed.
A couple of local operators have asked for technical details on relaying pilots talkback during the Southport Air Show through shoutcast.com
The normal rig that receives GB3OA transmissions is a Baofeng UV-3R. Its audio output is pumped through a sound card attached to a Raspberry Pi v.2. This uses the audio level controller Alsamixer program and then DarkIce to convert the analogue audio to digital and send it to shoutcast.com.
However, the UV-3R does not have AM nor airband to be able to receive the pilots transmissions. So a Kenwood TH-F7 HT will be used instead of the Baofeng. This rig has wide-band receive from 100kHz to 1.3GHz, and can receive CW, SSB, AM and wide and narrow FM. It can only transmit on 2m and 70cms, using wide or narrow FM.
A test with this rig was carried out earlier in the week tuned to Manchester Airport Area Control Centre on 128.050MHz and streamed to shoutcast.com. All worked well. The main frequency that will be used for the Southport Air Show will be 121.175MHz although other frequencies will be monitored and the TH-F7 retuned should another frequency be more interesting.
Note that once the TH-F7 is set up during this afternoon it will be left as is until the Air Show completes on Sunday at around 17.00BST. Therefore there will be no relaying of GB3OA during that period.
Also, the introductory announcement on the stream to shoutcast.com will change, to explain the new relay for those listening in worldwide.
Since the change to a new nodes server at GB3OA the tweet messages of when there is a connection to the nodes has been offline. Now, through the efforts of Repeater Keeper Mark G4EID, this facility is all fully working again.
The tweets can either be seen on the right hand side of any page on http://gb3oa.org.uk , or by subscribing to GB3OA on Twitter. By subscribing on Twitter you get instant notification that a user has connected to one of the nodes, the distant IRLP or Echolink node or reflector in use, and the callsign of the user.
We’ve put the following onto the Southgate ARC news website which feeds many clubs, as well as the ARRL news site:
This week there will be many thousands of scanner enthusiasts descending on Southport, UK for the Southport Air Show, and no doubt many of these will be hams. 2m repeater GB3OA, located next to Southport railway station, covers the beach fully at excellent strength, and has IRLP and Echolink nodes 5302. The full details for your HT memory are 145.6125, PL tone 82.5Hz and -600kHz shift. Up to 150,000 spectators will attend over the three days of Friday 15th, Sat. 16th and Sunday 17th, so a QSO is virtually guaranteed. Timeout is five minutes for RF-RF QSOs or four minutes for IRLP and Echolink, but please try to keep overs short.
The show starts at 17.35UTC on the Friday and 12.00UTC on the Saturday and Sunday. On the Friday aircraft will land on the beach and they can then be inspected up close. The Saturday and Sunday will have, amongst other attractions, bombing of the beach, twister aerobatics, kids tanks to drive, a paintball range and of course fly pasts of many classic and modern aircraft and helicopters. Full details can be found at:
http://www.military-airshows.co.uk/ven16.htm
https://www.visitsouthport.com/airshow
For those who can’t attend, the GB3OA stream on Shoutcast which normally relays the output of GB3OA repeater, will be turned over to relaying the main talkback frequency of the pilots. To hear this go to http://shoutcast.com and search for GB3OA.
The repeater keepers and Southport hams look forward to having a QSO with operators at this event and also via IRLP and Echolink through GB3OA.
The repeater keepers ask that Southport locals keep an ear on GB3OA during this period and respond to calls or CQs through GB3OA to make visitors welcome.
Testing this morning shows that IRLP is now back on-line and working normally. It seems something must have happened over in the States due to Hurricane Irma to cause the outage. However, there is another Hurricane on its way so there may be problems again when it passes through.
Also, the IRLP node status page was not updated from 10.38 UTC yesterday but is now being updated OK.
http://irlp.g4eid.co.uk/status/statusnode_page.html
Echolink continues to work normally.
The IRLP node at GB3OA is not functioning at present owing to problems caused by Hurricane Irma. Therefore it has been disabled for the present.
The Echolink node at GB3OA is for the moment functioning correctly, although, of course, this could well alter.
Any changes to the above will be posted.
RF to RF QSOs via GB3OA are not affected, nor The Stream to shoutcast.com
The IRLP and Echolink nodes 5302 will be down for a short time either this afternoon (Saturday) or tomorrow afternoon. This is to add a fan to a PSU that is warming up on longer node connections, and to also make a slight modification to monitoring equipment.
It’s expected that the nodes will be down for about an hour, although Murphy’s Law may rear its head of course 🙂
The node equipment itself will not be touched so no change will be noticed when using them after the downtime.
RF to RF contacts will not be affected during the downtime and continue as normal. Also, The Stream to http://shoutcast.com will continue as normal.
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