FLRig Quirks Part 2 and Other Projects

I mentioned recently that I saw some bugs with FLRig and the Xiegu G90.

My most recent quirk is simply that after a while the power meter vanishes when I remotely TX. And potentially I'm not actually transmitting. 

I that when I lost the meter, I still seemed to be getting contacts on FT8, so I went with it. A restart of FLRig seemed to make that change behaviour. 

Sometime later, the same thing started after I'd changed to 40m. I sent a few FT8 CQs, but no response. Checking the reception reports indicated nothing being heard. I tried closing it and reopening it to same effect.  Ultimately I needed to go and restart the radio. 

I noted too that if I turn the head off, the radio behaves stranger with this new firmware than I've ever seen before. Combinations of the above, random clicking and so on. 

Hard to tell what is what. Unusual. I should probably read up on the current firmware when I get time. 

This past weekend I fired up EasyPal on the IC706 while there was traffic going on. Over the course of 2 days on 40m, I received one image from VK5. I could see and hear some VK3 traffic, but the images never completed which was a bit disappointing. 

Great, the only thing I've ever received on EasyPal is a Trump Meme. 

Other projects:

My network has had a fairly major refresh these past few weeks and I've done more since I installed the Unifi Dream Machine Pro. 

I had an old 3Com PoE switch driving my security cameras which has since been replaced with a Unifi 16 port PoE switch that I picked up second hand. This integrated into my network as expected - easily - and has allowed me to do away with a couple of PoE injectors to the rear access points. I procrastinated a fair bit about this purchase, but in the decided it was worthwhile replacing the 15 year old switch I was using.

I've got a 5 port Unifi switch in the shed now with cameras connected to it. It's currently looped through the access point that has been hooked up down there pending the availability of the outdoor access point that is on backorder. I couldn't get a single one of these switches anywhere - those that were available were selling for twice what a single is worth. I could however buy a 3 pack - and I did, then I sold the 2 I wasn't using for what they were actually worth, so that stayed on budget. In fact, it actually had me around $20 ahead of the original order I had in for a single switch. 

My Network Storage server is getting some love.

Currently it uses a Norco RPC-4220 - a 4RU, 20 Bay SATA/SAS server chassis that I imported from the US some years ago. I noted fairly quickly some weird and wonderful issues with the SAS backplanes in this chassis - ranging from one whole backplane not working, to random I/O errors on certain ports that caused disks to be flagged as failing to the disk controller. 

The manufacturer started out being helpful - though their suggestions were things I knew to try 20 years ago and nothing of any particular substance. Once I got through various disk controllers, copious amounts of working disks, multiple power supplies and all manner of other things that they wanted tested but couldn't really have expected a customer to have (clearly not used to someone like myself then.. ), I asked them to just send me some new back planes. They're hardly complex circuits. Mysteriously they then stopped responding to me. 

They'd had a history with earlier revisions of killing disks with bad backplanes, and I then found a few horror stories of support nightmares. 

At the time I gave up on the damned thing. Too expensive to send back, no backplanes available for sale as spares via a third party. I had a number of disk shelves become available that I was able to hook up the various incarnations of servers to hold the disks. 

Over time, I replaced a lot of smaller disks with larger disks, reducing the number of bays until I got to the point that I wound up pulling the Norco case out and using a handful of working bays. This took up less rack space and made a lot less noise. Especially when you consider that I went from 60 spinning disks down to 6. 

Recently I needed to add more disks, and didn't have enough working bays, so I pulled out a disk shelf and fired it up. I happened to eyeball the power meter on that circuit. The redundant power supply alone added an extra 40w to the 700w+ load on the circuit. Too hungry, too loud and too old. 

I decided to order a 16 bay, 3RU case that should be just high enough to handle the full height cards I have in the server. They're not cheap these days, but at least it's from a seller in Australia and a brand that practically everyone is supplying. A tax return kind of expense. That'll get me from a total of 5RU down to 3RU of space, a few less cables and hopefully let me drop 80-100w of power consumption. 

At the moment I'm just waiting for it to get shipped. I've already received the rack rails and a new power supply for it. I just don't have the chassis itself. 

I could do with some more disks as well, but for now I'll have to settle with what I've got. At least once it's setup properly with all 4 backplanes connected, I'll have a few spare bays and should hopefully be at a point where I don't need to pull it back out of the rack again any time soon.