By Andy Nemec, KB9ALN
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope that you and yours enjoy a good holiday this year, and have many more to come.
We were lucky to be blessed with some very nice weather in October, which allowed many of us to take care of that nagging outside work. No, I am not talking about storm windows and storage of the lawn furniture (although I understand that certainly applies). I am talking about the stuff that we need to do in order to maintain our station installations, such as antenna and feedline work.
Joel. N9BQM has been busy doing just that, but not at home. He's one of a few who have been working on the Rudolph node site, correcting some longstanding problems.
Last month. I reported that the Rudolph site had been hit by lightning. Apparently, I was mistaken. Actually, that site had antenna problems. We're on a spare antenna there and it had some problems that go 'way back. The feedline had problems, and to make matters worse, there was a loose connection at the antenna. Which made for intermittent operation, on top of the poor performance related to the aforementioned feedline problem.
While Joel and the guys were at it, they slightly changed the orientation of the antenna so that it favors exiting links that are closer than the Wittenburg node stack. When finished, we're looking for the kind of performance that will give us a much more stable links to other parts of the network.
Thanks go to Joel, the tower climber and others who assisted in this project.
On another topic. Rich, AA9L from Milwaukee sent me E-Mail, asking about a problem he was having with the MSYS BBS at MSOE. Actually, there were two problems One was a disconnection problem he was having between his personal station and the BBS. It seems that he would get disconnected from the BBS after getting a few inital packets when the connection was first established. He found an interesting solution to his problem - he changed the TNC he was using at home. Once changed, the problem went away.
One can only speculate as to the problem within the TNC, but whatever it was seemed to affect the time to respond to incoming packets (RESPTIME in some TNCs). The TNC would take to long to acknowledge incoming packets, thus, the BBS would think the connection was lost and send a disconnect packet.
Another problem has not seen a resolution as of yet. When someone is reading messages on the BBS and decides to reply, the BBS program would exit all by itself. He is using MSYS version 1.2 beta 4, a 486 computer running at 66 MHz, and Windows NT as an operating system.
I no longer run MSYS in Green Bay, so I was not able to offer him much help. If anyone has any ideas on how to fix Rich's problem, drop him a line at:
Still no word on the arrangements for the WAPR meeting. Keep an eye out on your local BBS for the date and time.
That's all for this month, folks. If you have packet news you'd like to share, be sure to contact me through one of the addresses at the top of this page.
Until next time, 73 from Andy
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