I received a disturbing report last night that the network "sucks".
Glad I wasn't serious in the contest because it surely made me concerned.
The early indication is that the 30 second retry was too long. Probably
this station was using it for a multi-single and if a QSO didn't get
updated immediately, they had to wait 30 seconds for a retry.
One obvious question is why did the retry need to happen? Maybe there
was an RF problem - and if that was fixed, it would be okay. The other
answer would be to make the retry timing a programmable parameter that
can be optimized to the specific installation. Certainly a much shorter
value (say 5 seconds) could be used if you are only using two
computers. Or I could get real fancy and measure the number of computers
in the loop and automatically set the retry time for 5 seconds * number
of computers. That would not be too hard.
Maybe it would only affect the first few retries and then go to the 30
second ones (assuming a computer is rebooting or something).
I would be interested in hearing how others faired with the network
this weekend (I assume also with only two computers) so I can come
up with the best solution for the two computer case.
73 Tree N6TR
tree@contesting.com
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