[OZAPRS] Problem with rotate.aprs.net.au address?

Grant vk5gr at bigpond.com
Sat Jan 5 16:21:38 EST 2013


Hi Folks,

 

As I have put in the subject here, I am wondering if there is a problem with
the way the rotate.aprs.net.au address is working?

 

By way of explanation for what has lead me to ask the question, here is my
tale.

 

For some time I have been having problems getting my weather station
(VK5GR-1) which is connected via the Internet to have its packets reliably
picked up by the APRS net (and in particular be displayed on www.aprs.fi). I
was beaconing every 15 minutes, and would sometimes see no frames appear on
aprs.fi for several hours, and at times days.  I originally put it down to a
number of factors including:

 

.         The PC was connected via WiFi to my router

.         The Wifi was unreliable and appeared to drop back to one way comms


.         The NetGear Cable Wifi router appeared to lockup the Wifi port

.         The Weather beacon was running on a very slow (low powered) VIA
based PC and perhaps was dropping packets on the LAN

.         The eCumulus software I was using doesn't hold up the connections
permanently (unlike UIView) and the slow PC was taking too long to
re-establish the IP connection for the software to send the data each time

 

Slowly I have been working through trying to eliminate each of these. I have

 

1.       Removed all ancillary programs from the PC (I didn't replace it as
previously it has run on this machine fine for about 2 years)

2.       Replaced the Wifi with Cat5 cable again

3.       Cleaned up the disks and verified free space etc etc

4.       Updated to the latest versions of software and drivers

5.       Changed from DHCP LAN Address assignment to fixed IP within my
NAT'ed LAN (removes the NetGear router interfering with IP connectivity).

6.       Changed the interval from 15 to 5 minutes

 

It was this last step that started to see some positive results. This made
me suspicious. So, I then looked at the server address I was connecting to
and have now moved it back to second.aprs.net.au and set the interval for
now at 10 minutes. Since doing this yesterday morning, I appear to have not
missed a packet! Even through the weather PC and the router both got a bit
toasty with the 44deg C day we had (the rooms they are in are not air
conditioned here).

 

The only significant change I made that made an impact to the packet
reliability was changing from rotate.aprs.net.au to second.aprs.net.au.

 

So while I am still not convinced it isn't something at this end (most
likely with the crappy netgear router), I thought it significant enough to
ask - is there something unique about rotate.aprs.net.au that could be
impacting things? 

 

Anyone have any thoughts?

 

I am working to actually place the entire weather station permanently back
on RF soon but would like to keep a reliable output weather stream in the
meantime making it into the APRS-IS network to monitor conditions here as we
head through next week's heatwave.

 

Regards,

Grant VK5GR

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aprs.net.au/pipermail/ozaprs/attachments/20130105/36a76217/attachment.html>


More information about the OZAPRS mailing list