Just noting that my self spots on 20m from GM/WS-226 today seemed to have been severely delayed in transit. I sent a spot via Iridium at 13:15 and another at 13:21 after a QSY to avoid QRM. It looks like both were delayed somewhere until 16:06. We had long left the summit by then. This probably explains why I got no contacts on this band (though conditions seemed rather poor too).
I had no way of knowing at the time as there was no phone coverage on any network from this location.
There has been a lot of solar flare activity lately which has been causing outages to various networks.
Nick
These things always fail when you actually need them to work! They always fail when I’m not there to nurse them either… I’m sat having breakfast in Germany and have only just managed to get the Hotel Wifi to let me on. I suppose it makes little difference where I am as the spotter runs on a server in Iceland.
One spot arrived at 12:26 another 12:49 then nothing till 16:06. Now I had to spend a few moments trying to remember how all the systems link together, embarrassing as I wrote it. You message goes via Iridium to Delorme. They send it as an SMS to my UK number, which sits in W6-land, that service provider sends it as an web post to my web server in Iceland which processes it and pokes SOTAwatch which is in Manchester or Coventry or New York (can’t remember). There’s lots of places for things to get stuck. I think the likely culprits are DeLorme taking a long time to send the SMS to my number or it taking a long time for that SMS to forwarded to me in Iceland. Once it arrived in Iceland it was on SOTAwatch in few seconds.
I suppose the thing to do now knowing there was a delay would be to ensure you have plenty of alerts up so people know what you and Caroline wll be doing. But that is hard because you’ll only decide at the last minute.
Have fun anyway. Bright blue sky and 24C in Friedrichshafen.
Andy DL/MM0FMF
I noticed some other SMS spots popped out at 16:06 so I suspect the delay wasn’t at DeLorme.
At least my earlier spots on 5MHz and 7MHz worked. With the sky a bit dodgy, we would have struggled to qualify without.