It's no secret my love of VHF contesting has diminished greatly over the
last few years for a variety of reasons. Bottom line, it's not the fun
it used to be. However, I do usually try to make an appearance and at
least work some "neighbors" and friends!
This time I will not be on. On the morning of January 3, shortly after
giving K3SK a new state on 2 meters, my shack PC suddenly shut down. I
was able to reboot it only after several hours of work and then
intermittently and it wouldn't stay running long. This was not
altogether unexpected, as it had been showing signs of hardware problems
for a while. It all started with an ugly power failure that somehow
fried one CPU core! It ran OK for a while after that on 5 cores but then
started getting erratic.
The only short or medium term solution was to move my bench PC to the
ham shack. Having just the one computer, located in the shack, is
inconvenient in many ways but it does have the advantage of reducing
electricity costs significantly if I am on the air much. That should
allow me to be on the air more than I have been for the past few years.
And it will force me to be in the shack more, probably not a bad thing.
The transition has not been entirely smooth. I have a USB sound
interface that works only after one to several power cycles of the
device. It is always recognized by the operating system and applications
but there is no audio in or out until eventually a hard restart gets it
sorted out. This is a strange one. More importantly, due to another
hardware problem I cannot band switch to 144, 222 or 432. I could build
a manual switch as a temporary workaround but I have so much work left
to do with this whole computer swap I have just kept driving toward a
long term solution that restores 100% of former functionality. I have
hardware on the way that should get band switching back to normal but it
won't be here until next week.
Financial barriers aside, it would be far less stressful to have a tower
fall over!
Have fun, and I will (hopefully!) be on for the next one!
73,
Paul N1BUG FN55mf
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