Friday, 21 February 2014

I took a trip up to M1ABD yesterday afternoon and found the area covered in SSE vans and more people than I have ever seen on top of Bullbarrow before.
I spoke to one of the linemen who said that they were fixing the fault and the power should be back on that evening.
This morning M1ABD had still not appeared on the map.
So, once again I took a trip up the hill.
I found that the power had come back on, but the computer was not running.
It appears that the computer power supply had given up trying to deal was the on-off electricity and had died. I keep a spare computer on site (a very old one that will only run Windows 95), so I persuaded it to spring into life and replaced the broken computer.
M1ABD is now back on air again and appears to be running normally.

Ted (2e1ejc@dpars.net)

Thursday, 20 February 2014

Yet again the electricity is off at Bullbarrow Hill and M1ABD is off air. It would appear that this is going to happen every time we get heavy rain until SSE finally fix the problem.
The last packet transmitted by M1ABD was just before 0200 Hours this morning.

Tuesday, 18 February 2014

The electricity was off again at M1ABD from 0045 Hours until approx. 1500 Hours today. There was a problem with an underground cable that went to a transformer on a pole in the middle of a field. Fingers crossed, the problem has been solved.

Monday, 17 February 2014

The electricity came back on at M1ABD at Bullbarrow Hill at 1450 Hours today. M1ABD is back on air and working normally.

Saturday, 15 February 2014

There has been a complete power failure at the M1ABD site on Bullbarrow Hill. The back-up generator has also failed (Possibly due to lack of fuel).
So, M1ABD will be off the air until power is restored.

Tuesday, 19 November 2013

As part of an on-going upgrade of my computers (XP is not being supported by Microsoft after April 2014) I upgraded my APRS computer to Windows 7. UiView would not talk to the TNC and reported that either the COM port was busy or the TNC was sending the wrong responses.
Nothing I did would persuade the computer and TNC to talk to each other. So, nothing left to do but ask Mr Google.
After much reading, it seemed that the problem lies in the age of Uiview and it was never designed to run in Windows 7. However, setting the program to run in Compatibility Mode, choosing Windows XP SP3 and ticking the "Run as Administrator" box solved the problem.
The computer is now talking to the TNC and Uiview is running happily on a Windows 7 computer.
Sigh of relief! :-)

Thursday, 12 September 2013



G0ROZ-3 disappeared from the map and a check with aprs.fi showed the last beacon heard was at around 2300 Hours 10 September 2013. Today I made a trip up the hill and found the computer screen looking as above. It appears that the power must have gone down on 10 September and the computer did not re-boot itself correctly. A quick re-boot of the computer and all is working as it should again.