I was out for a walk on Saturday with the XYL with the intention to activate GW/NW-043 on route.
The plan was to self spot on arrival as I wanted to keep our timing fluid.
On arrival I setup at Watkins Tower ruins and started calling on 20m. The problem was that I couldn’t get a self spot out using Sotagoat on iPhone or Rucksack Sota on my Android phone. It seemed that I couldn’t even get a 2G signal surprisingly being within 1/2 mile of what looked like mobile transmitters. Unfortunately after 1/2 an hour of calling I had to accept failure and pack away to continue our walk
As I did have several bars of normal service it did occur to me that I would have been able to get an SMS out. With that in mind I have spent the last couple of days looking on reflector for information but was not able to get a clear picture what is current in terms of SMS gateways.
So after a rambling intro to the question can anyone tell me what is the best way to get a self spot out using SMS?
I use Andy 'MMF’s excellent sms service. This is included in the link provided by Christophe ON6ZQ in his post above (the Intermoose link).
No apps required, and any phone will do, as long as you register the number with Andy first, and have enough signal to send a text.
Hi Paul,
You already had the capability with you! Rucksack Radio Tool (make sure you updated to the latest version from a couple of weeks back or you wont see any spots on it, due to SOTA website changes by the way) can spot either via an Internet connection OR via SMS.
It is not unusual that SMS works when Internet connectivity does not in some remote locations.
Just send Andy MM0FMF a note with the number from the phone (or phones) you’ll be sending an SMS from, he will add the your numbers to the gateway, to allow access and in RRT select that you want SMS alerts to go to the UK SMS gateway.
Thanks for all of the the advice guys it is appreciated.
It seems the key point for most SMS tools is registering my numbers for the gateway with Andy, email sent to Andy
That also probably explains why Rucksack radio tool said something like “Spot seems to have been sent successfully” but then the spot had not appeared in the spot list when I checked later.
Hi!
let me underline that on some of this SMS gateways you do not need any registration (eg the italian one I own) and no app is necessary even though they are very helpful.
M0KKA mail received Sat, 08:53 Jan 23
M0KKA setup complete mail sent Sat, 16:53, Jan 23
If you didn’t get it, check junk/spam filters. If it’s still missing then we will have to blame hotmail.com. However, one reason I still use them is that unlike many providers, they rarely drop mail, they place in my junk folder.
The webserver sits in the shack and I turned it off when I got fed up with Chinese script kiddies trying to hack it. The webserver isn’t Apache but they banged away trying to see if it would succumb to Apache exploits and in doing so ate up big chunks of my internet bandwidth.
I’ve turned it on again so we’ll see how many hours it is before they start the hacking attempts again.
Andy had mentioned web attacks on that resource in the past. It had been taken down for that reason. Only Andy can speak for its current status, or its future.
The information that had been provided there has been compiled, along with any additional SMS information known to me, into the document (link) below. Is this what you are looking for?