No December RATS Meeting - Informal Zoom gathering tonight 7:30 PM

[RATS General Mailbox]

Richmond Amateur Telecommunications Society
General Announcement

No December RATS Membership Meeting

Since the membership got together for our annual holiday dinner this week, there is no RATS membership meeting tonight.  You're welcome to drop in to our Membership Meeting Zoom room at 7:30 PM for an informal social gathering.  No RATS business will be handled tonight.  Regular monthly meetings resume in January.  You can find the link at rats.net/meetings.

Temporary Backup LTE Service Installed at the Repeater Site

The RATS repeater site has experienced several lengthy Internet service outages over the past month or so, the longest lasting about 17.5 hours.  These outages do not impact the handling of local radio traffic but they do isolate our DMR and WIRES-X repeaters from other networked systems, take down our Internet tunnels to/from the AREDN system, and disrupt service on our Winlink RMS gateway.  While our Technical Committee figures out whether the root cause is with our service provider or our Internet equipment, a temporary LTE backup connection has been installed which will keep the DMR and Winlink systems operational while providing diagnostic access during any future outages.  Automatic failover to this backup connection was tested last night with positive results.

Users should notice improved network reliability on the DMR repeater.   Due to technical limitations, it is not easy to provide WIRES-X network services over LTE, and that functionality is not in place at this time.

This backup connection is being furnished with no hardware or service-related costs to the club.  It'll remain in place until we stabilize the primary connection or change service providers.

If you would like to receive e-mail updates regarding outages or performance issues with the RATS repeaters and digital data systems, see the sign-up instructions at rats.net/status.

Next Meetings

Board Meeting - Wednesday, January 3 at 6:30 PM
Membership Meeting - Friday, January 19 at 7:30 PM

Meetings are held via Zoom.  Access codes and meeting links were recently changed.  See rats.net/meetings for current details.

You can find video and minutes from recent meetings at rats.net/minutes.

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