Here are a few observations from the MBARC/BARS 2003 Field Day (W1ON/NF1A)
effort. We ran an 802.11B network of 6 systems in our 3A effort. 3 main HF
stations, a VHF station, a GOTA station and a central laptop not associated
with any station. The stations were separated by about 300'. The central
laptop, MCP, was set up in the middle of the stations.
The network ran fairly well using a mix of LinkSys PCMCIA WAP cards, Compaq
WAP cards and IBM Thinkpad built in WAP. Aren't standards wonderful.
A WAN firewall that had a built in DHCP server was connected to a Linksys
WAP to serve up the IP addresses. Really sweet.
All stations were running WriteLog 10.40 we had a mix of XP, Win2000, and
Win98 OS. The station ID's were:
HF1 A
HF2 B
HF3 C
VHF F
MCP D Spare/central laptop
GOTA N
The problems we observed:
1. Major: GOTA Laptop would call stations previously worked by main
stations as dupes. This was immediately a problem, so we took the GOTA
station off the network and created a fresh standalone log for the duration
of the test. The GOTA station had the N station letter. This has been
reported by others here.
2. Minor: Operators not displayed at all laptops despite insuring everyone
oped on.
3. Minor: Idle stations drop off "Networked Frequencies" display.
4. Minor: Two meter FM contacts got counted as 0 points.
Some enhancements requests:
We could not observe the remote stations individual band rates from the
main laptop. It would be nice to see how the stations are producing from a
central point so that we could make band change decisions with out running
up and down the line to see the rates per band. I thought the View -> By PC
on the network would provide us this info, but it did not.
A hotkey is desperately needed to change operators. The grab the mouse,
select Entry->Change Operators->
Operator just takes too much time when swapping operators during high rates.
Some questions:
Merging. Using the "Import ADI" method outlined by W5XD last April, I find
that the GOTA station contacts get heavily "Duped" out. Do we just manually
add the Q's on the ARRL paper work or is there a way around this?
It took a bit to stabilize the network at first, and it would occassionally
need to be restarted during the course of the test, as a result sequence
numbers are not in sequence. Should I care? How should I handle these?
We changed the entry fields from RCV and QTH to CLASS and SECTION. We
deleted Country, C and one other field (I can't remember what it was) to
improve the overall ease of use. As a result WL could no longer keep track
of Sections worked. While they don't count as mults, several operators
commented they like to watch what sections they have worked. Is there anyway
to associate the named "Section" field so that the sections worked could be
observed? Could the basic form for
this contest be cleaned up so we wouldn't have to edit the exchange fields
to begin with?
Overall we were extremely pleased how this all played.
Ken
WO1N
W1ON/NF1A 3A EMA
|