Yesterday I activated two summits, GW/SW-008 and GW/SW-010. On the second I sent three spot via Rucksack Radio, for 5MHz and 7MHz. I got not chasers and suspected a problem. I called for a while until the battery was flagging and I went to the WAB net who saved the day.
When I got home I checked the spots and, as I suspected, none had appeared. At the time all showed as ‘Message sent’. I then tried to re-send the last spot as TEST IGNORE, and with the frequency changed from 7.125 to 7.000 to underline that. It appeared on the spot list. I then searched the sent texts list and found that the contents of the texts sent from the afternoon activation were completely consistent with the spots I sent successfully in the morning.
Has anyone else had these problems? This is the second time in recent weeks this has happened. Without knowing what the problem is I don’t know what I need to do to improve reliability. Thanks.
Hi John,
Were you using SMS or Internet to spot from the summit? If Internet- how was the Cell signal - did the phone indicate 3G, HSPDA or only Edge? If only Edge, the Internet message may not have got through.
I was out last Tuesday and RRT was working fine but I know it is sensitive to Internet capabilities. If I don’t see my spot come back in RRT when I send it via the Internet, I’ll send it again using the SMS option in RRT.
I take it no errors (usually with reference to faulty CSV or something) came up when you sent your spot from the summit?
The problem a couple of weeks ago was because the SOTAWatch URL changed which required such spotting applications to change their code to use the new URL. I’m presuming you have the latest version of RRT?
Hi Ed,
I was using the SMS method as I don’t use data any more. The usual message displayed, i.e. “Message Sent”. Using the information on the RRT screen from the activation the SMS spot appeared on the spots page when I was at home. It seemed to be a ‘random’ event. I noted that other spots at roughly the same time and posted using RRT were on the SOTAwatch spot page. My hunch is that the problem must be at the SOTAwatch end, but I would like to know so I can decide what to do. 73 John
Hi John,
I suggest you send Andy MM0FMF a private mail and tell him the time your SMS spots were sent. It’s Andy’s SMS gateway that you are using and he can see if the SMS message was ever received. When SMS messages are sent from one telco to another they can get dropped. There are also areas where SMS simply doesn’t work. If the problem re-occurs you might want to try with one of the other Android spotting apps. As you don’t have Internet connectivity to your phone, I wonder why you use RRT?
Thanks for the help. It looks like it was a mobile phone problem then. In a way that’s bad news at if it was RRT or SOTAwatch I’m sure it could be fixed. No such hope with the mobile telephony companies! Spotting is great but everyone relies on it now, and there aren’t as many knob-twiddlers out there doing it the old-fashioned way.
I just updated my RRT app and my saved usernames / passwords have gone. Could you tell me if the username I should enter is the username I have for GMA (i,e, not my call sign), and if it is case-sensitive. I’m running out of combinations! Thanks.
Oops forgot to say after installing the new version of RRT you have to re-configure. I did state this in another RRT thread on this reflector but forgot it here as I thought you were on the latest version. As far as SMS spotting is concerned, there’s no change between the last version of RRT and the latest one - the change was for the Internet side of the app.
As Andy pointed out, the SMS text from the summit never got out it seems. I’ve had situations where at one side of a summit all is fine but at the other side not. I have had cell phone coverage but no SMS or Internet. It’s just one of those things!
