W7MOT DStar Gateway Status 4 February 2010

A trip to White Tanks this past Tuesday was made to evaluate the status of our DStar gateway and cause. I'm happy to say we have the Gateway server working normally and all features are now working.

Dave Hall, n7zpy and Paul Boyce, kj7ky were part of the team that made the trip. The road had been bladed the week prior to the storms and was a pleasure to drive in 4x4 with no boulder bouncing and axle & frame banging. And no dust! It was an pleasant day for being at the site. The weather was clear and sunny with a slight breeze and temperature about 65. Visibility was fair with some haze. It might have been a good day for mirror flashes. N7TWW attempted door mirror flashes from Thompson Pk. No sightings.

The server was found in a OFF state and would not auto start on site. It is a DELL blade server and was actually in a cold OFF state. Recover from this state requires the manual pressing of the "RED" ON button. The system booted normally.

The root cause of the problem was the UPS batteries having deteriorated to a point they can not provide capacity for 60 seconds. The UPS was reporting a battery problem for the last month. Replacement batteries were order prior to the "storm" and our failure conditions. The batteries were not available for this initial trip. They were delivered yesterday. A trip is being planned for Saturday to replace the UPS batteries.

Why the server failed to auto start has not been specifically identified. All setup conditions were confirmed and tests of auto start were all normal. Further research is being done on this subject. If you have suggestions or specific input on this issue, please contactl Norm Johnson, aa7oo.

The B slice is linked to the Arizona Reflector REF009C.

Please remember to report suspected failures to one of the dstar admins or any MARCA Borard member.

Norm Johnson, aa7oo, W7MOT DStar Administrator