[GCARC] Revisions to Echolink and Winlink stations yesterday

[Jon Pearce]

Yesterday Mike KG4JYA and I attempted to solve an issue that has apparently plagued the Echolink station. The Event Log for the Windows computer on that station showed "unexpected" restarts occurring at odd times - sometimes in the middle of the night when nobody would be operating - that indicated that something had crashed the computer.  Sometimes the computer could restart itself while other times it required a hard reboot on-site.

Looking at the previous physical equipment layout we saw that the RF components (notably the diplexer and feedlines) of the Winlink station ran directly over some of the cables for the Echolink PC and surmised that the RF from Winlink may be getting into the Echolink PC (which is an inexpensive Atom-powered device that replaced the previous Pentium 4 monster) and crashing it. We removed everything, moved both computers to the top shelf, moved the radios and cables to the bottom shelf and ran the coax vertically down from there. Mike also put ferrite chokes onto all of the cables running into either of the PCs.

We couldn't test anything because the Echolink restarts appeared to be random, but hopefully these changes will mitigate some of the issues that we've had with that station.

Unfortunately it appears that something has now gotten messed up with the Winlink station since I'm getting notifications that it's off the air. I'll try to get to the clubhouse sometime soon to check it out. It worked fine yesterday.

73 de Jon WB2MNF