70cm ⁽²⁾

(MeshCom woes indeed but not MeshCom's fault!) As mentioned before I have been fiddling with a RAK setup and MeshCom. I had MeshCom running on both the RAK and a T-Beam device, the former connected by Ethernet adapter and running as Internet gateway, the latter by wifi and connecting to the gateway via RF. My aim was to run the RAK node in the loft connected to the 70cm collinear that is already up there and power it from one of the shack Netgear Ethernet switches. However, it has been running on the shack desk powered over USB because of the issue with the PoE board. Also, it was freezing at random intervals and so I have been using 'cu' to log the console debugging information to file to see if there was any error messages. The board would run like that form one or two days then freeze with no obvious cause - no errors, except twice it froze after a few APRS callsign error messages. Given this and given the plan to run it off a Netgear switch I planned to monitor it and use SNMP to toggle the PoE on the relevant port if it froze. That…

Some interesting distances in the VHF/UHF lift on the 18th and 19th January, all not too bad for loft mounted antennas - a 2m QFH and a 70cm big wheel, running 20W from the TS2000X, FT8. On the 18th I managed three 2m FT8 QSOs with French stations, one 386 miles south from me. Later on I was receivd 502 miles away in Denmark on 70cm FT8 but no QSO. On the 19th came a 2m FT8 QSO with Denmark at 432 miles.