I noticed that I wasn’t picked up yesterday by RBNHole during my second cw activation (yay!) despite showing up on RBN on all three bands I worked. I was maybe 30 min later than my alert time. I had good data coverage so I checked sotawatch after calling cq for maybe 5min. I didn’t see a spot so I just spotted myself.
73,
Joe
Looks like very few were picked up via RBNHole today. Definitely none in the afternoon. reversebeacon.net isn’t loading spots as well currently. So… looks like more of a RBN server issue than something on the SOTA side. Good that you had cell coverage! Hope it is working tomorrow as I’ll be activating in a marginal cell area. GL es 73 de K7MK
Ah, yeah now I see there were several activators that weren’t picked up by RBNHole right around the time I was on the hill.
Thanks! I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t done something wrong with my alert or something.
73,
Joe
I’ve noticed that RBN often doesn’t pick up my calls even though I get replies. I seem to be invisible to it on 17m.
Just to be clear: I was spotted on three bands on RBN and had an active alert but wasn’t picked up by RBNhole. Looks like I wasn’t the only one, though.
Yeah, it does seem to have some flakiness going on lately. I had the same thing happen yesterday.
73
Yep…same as I experienced four days ago on my last activation. I was spotted on a few bands but the spots came late. I wasn’t spotted at all on 20m and gave up after calling CQ for a long time. I must admit that I have really gotten lazy since RBN Hole usually works so well! Many of us count on this tool where cellphone coverage is marginal or worse.
I also really appreciate when the chasers spot us. Many chasers monitor the frequencies we normally use and will then spot us after we make contact.
73, Brad
WA6MM
I need to get consistent about my freq usage for this exact reason.
This thread is about 2 days old yet I’ve seen no input from Andrew @VK3ARR. That means he’s away on business and is unable to attend to the server. I’m sure as soon as he has some time he’ll give the server a good slap and fix it.
The problem is that the exact frequency is much harder to predict than the time of arrival on the summit. I have learned from experience that it is much better to search long for a free slot on 40 m, if necessary in the entire band, than to use 30m or 20m unless I have bagged at least four QSOs.
So it is really hard to tell upfront - I typically alert as 7.031-cw, but might be forced to escape contest traffic and will end up at 7.002-cw.
On 30m, less people have good antennas (as the recent survey has shown), on 20m condx are unpredictable, and on both bands, the first skip is often too long to reach the many chasers in Central Europe from a summit in the alps.
73 de Martin, DK3IT
Yet again they’ve changed the header for the RBN relay server I use so my initial handshake with the server fails until they block me for too many unsuccessful attempts. Rinse and repeat. Going to try a different relay server that might be a bit more stable.
Play this 8 times and you’ll get the drift, if you ignore the crude 80s attempt at making Europeans look Asian.
On the other hand, they’re now pushing FT8 spots out via the RBN, so I might be able to properly implement the FT8Hole variant using that rather than PSK Reporter which is just a flood of data (and also rate limits).
VK3ARR,
Thanks for looking after the RBNHole! Appreciate it and 73!
Jim/K7MK