[UK-CONTEST] RE: Telnet

[Andy Summers]

Steve,

I see you've already had some useful replies, but I thought I'd chip-in with
some experiences from the GB5HQ 15m SSB station.

We used GPRS to access the internet for WriteLog log sharing and to receive
telnet cluster spots. The telnet connection was somewhat more successful
than the log sharing. What I want to bring to your attention is the loss of
connection problems we encountered. The GPRS connection was regularly
dropped, either by Orange, or by the ISP Orange uses. It happened about once
an hour, but it wasn't exactly an hour. This can't have been due to lack of
traffic! We also had a good signal.

Getting the link back was pretty painful. Both the phone's accessory
handling software and the PC resident software that provides the serial
interface appeared to crash. Mostly you could get it all back by terminating
the telnet session, powering the phone off then on, then re-inserting the
butt-plug. Sometimes a complete PC re-boot was required to get everything
talking again. Note that Writelog grabs all available serial ports for
itself, so it has to be started after the telnet session.

I don't know if this is just peculiar to Orange. Anyone any better
experiences with other companies?

73,
Andy, G4KNO.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: uk-contest-bounces at contesting.com
> [mailto:uk-contest-bounces at contesting.com]On Behalf Of

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2003 07:43:26 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Steve Bunting <stephen.bunting at kcl.ac.uk>
> To: uk-contest at contesting.com
> Subject: [UK-CONTEST] Telnet
> Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0312130741460.14106-100000 at redwood>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
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> Message: 1
>
> Hi again everyone,
>
> I have a brief question for you all from a computing innocent.....
>
> I am looking into telnet cluster access to using a GPRS mobile
> phone. The idea is to get reliable cluster access from a remote contest
> location, RF links have proved to be nothing but trouble. I am trying to
> assess the cost of keeping the link live for a 24hour contest. As you
> probably know the phone companies charge per MB transferred rather than
> unit time, with Orange it is 2.55UKP plus VAT per MB.
>
> Now my questions: how many bytes constitute one cluster spot? A more
> difficult question is how many spots are there per contest weekend? I am
> guessing at a mean of 3 spots per minute, i.e. 180 per hour and
> therefore 3420 per 24 hours. Lets round that up to a ballpark 5000. Is
> that reasonable for a FD?
>
> I don't want to commit to a route that will cost a fortune to keep
> alive, but I am guessing that a single spot is pretty small. If I am
> feeling very tight, I can probably reduce traffic (and hence costs) by
> setting filters at the cluster.
>
> Can anyone advise or add experiences to this?
>
> Thanks as always.
>
> 73
> Steve
> M0BPQ