VARA FM Gateway Decom’d

The VARA FM Gateway on 145.070 has been decommissioned due to lack of use. After reviewing the logs, it only saw 15 connections in the last 30 days and 52 in the last 90. Simply not enough activity or interest to dedicate resources to maintaining.

AREDN Node Firmware Updated

The NM5PB-ABQ node has been updated to 3.21.4.0. Continued work and testing is in progress. Mobile to home “meshing” is working well and increased distance testing is scheduled along with point-to-point testing for Summer of 2022. Interested in AREDN? Visit https://www.arednmesh.org for more info.

Battery Backup Capacity Increased

The battery backup capacity at the QTH in ABQ has been increased to a calculated runtime of five days. This includes discharge to 50% and is the raw capacity not including the solar recharging that could also be employed during an outage. A full scale runtime test will be scheduled at a later date to […]

Kantronics 9V Battery Test

Its been a while since I’ve done this and needed the brain refresher. Set up the KPC-3 with power solely off of the internal 9V battery, I was able to achieve almost 24 hours of use with menu LEDS OFF set and automated connections to the RMS gateway every hour for message send/receive. Certainly not […]

HF RMS Gateway – VARA updated to 4.4.3 Stage 2

The Vara HF modem at NM5PB-11 has been updated to v4.4.3 Stage 2. The previous release version of VARA uses a 16-bit hash to resolve the callsign and this has a small but finite chance of getting the call wrong (One in 6553 error rate).  John Wiseman detected and reported a case he observed this […]