On February 6, 2010 the K5GLH tower came down. This is the tower that hosted the 443.3 MHz repeater (WIN System). This was a move that had nothing to do with the Del City Amateur Radio club but rather to help facilitate the sale of my home. As I have posted before, we are planning to buy a new home but we need to remove the tower because many potential buyers may see it as an eye sore.
This was a sad moment for me but it was a necessary move to be able to sell our home for the most we can. I took 87 pictures of this removal and have them on Flickr.
In this picture you can see the top section coming down.
As you can see in the photo above the last section is being removed.
In this photo you can see the spot where the tower once was. This is a very sad image to me although I know it was a necessary move. I know many of you are wondering where this leaves the 443.3 MHz repeater. Well the antenna that was on the top of this tower can be seen in the photo below.
This antenna has been installed on a side mount on the same tower that the 145.25 MHz repeater is installed. As soon as weather permits, this will be connected to the 443.3 repeater in the new location. This being a side mount installation on the Southwest leg of the tower will likely result a null to the Northeast.
In this photo you can see the UHF antenna being installed in its new configuration on the W5QO tower. This will be the new home of the 443.3 MHz repeater. At some point this antenna may be raised to the top on a candelabra type installation. Keep an ear open for this repeater when the weather clears up. This was a very busy weekend getting the tower taken down and the antenna being reinstalled at the new location. I am hopeful that everything goes smooth on the new tower. The IRLP will be a new challenge and may have to be moved as well to enable both nodes to work. Each node requires its own unique external IP address to be able to operate. This is because both nodes use the same ports and a router could not forward the same ports in two directions. This is a small problem that will be resolved in the coming days. The club officers were in agreement that we needed communication with the members as to the status of this move. This post is being posted both on the club blog as well as my personal blog so that this information will be the most widely disseminated.
Thanks,
Paul, K5GLH
Tags: Del City, Del City Amateur Radio Club, repeater, tower, W5DEL
My Internet problems may be fixed and I owe it all to the employees of Cox communications. I have posted about my Internet connectivity issues on many occasions so much so that I am sure people are getting tired of hearing about it. I am still not for sure why things turned out the way they did but I am very happy. I signed up for Cox High Speed Internet about three months ago and have been plagued with dropped connections every few minutes. Those of you that know my family also know that we are heavy Internet users. When this started out we were using a Belkin F5D7230-4 router that we had purchased from Wal-Mart a couple years ago.
This router cost about $39.99 and was clearly on the low end of the spectrum. The Internet was dropping about every 30 to 40 minutes on this router and the only way to get it back was to reboot the modem and the router. I lived with this for about two months before finally getting so mad. I thought I should change routers before calling Cox just to make sure that it is not my equipment. In January my wife and I went to Office Depot in Moore, Oklahoma and spent $180.00 for what we thought was going to be a good router.
This router is a D-Link DIR-825 and is an “N” router with dual band 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz capability. I did some research to see if it was a good product before buying it. This router had some very good reviews and seemed to be liked by many. I thought with all the positive reviews, this router would be a good choice because one of the advertised features was heavy use on multiple computers. We came home and hooked up this new router and it worked wonderfully for about two days. I was amazed at how good it worked when it was working. After about two days the drop outs started again. This time they would fix themselves after about five minutes. The dropouts became so bad that at one point it was down five minutes and came back on for about 40 seconds before going back down.
I was becoming more angry by the minute. I reluctantly called Cox technical support just knowing they were going to say it was my router. I have found that many times when you call tech support for any organization they always blame it on your equipment. Well just as I thought, they went through the troubleshooting process and within minutes came to the conclusion that it was my router. Of course I did not believe them and thought they were just “passing the buck” so they would not have to take responsibility for my issues. In my mind there was no way it could be my router because after all, I just bought a brand new $180.00 router with hundreds of positive reviews. At this point I was not only angry but indignant. In my frustration I started posting on Twitter about my persistent Internet problems. I made a point to mention Cox by name because in my mind it was their poor infrastructure that was causing my issues.
To my surprise, my Twitter posts were recognized by several Cox employees. The couple that I remember off the top of my head were Cox_Will, CoxNicky, and DonaldOhse. These employees went out of their way to contact me directly to help come to a resolution. It was Cox_Will that called me on the phone, did some tests, and had a local Cox representative contact me. I posted a story on my blog that listed my symptoms. I then sent this link to Cox_Will over Twitter. The person he put me in contact with was Debbie Chaffee from Oklahoma. They had a couple technical support people come out to my house and spent over four hours on a cold rainy evening. I really wish I could remember their names so they could get the credit they deserved. They replaced the drop line to the box on the back of my house. They installed a new cable coming from the box into the house.
They even installed a brand new white wall plate that better matched the paint in the house. They went up on the pole with some sort of tester to see if the line was good coming to our home.
They even communicated with some tech support people at a remote site using their Nextel phones.
In the end, they discovered that by pinging various servers both of my routers the latency was terrible and inconsistent. They were showing me the results going from 7 ms all the way up to 184 ms. When connected directly to my computer they were consistently less than 10 ms. It was hard for me to argue with that. Then they brought in a cheaper Linksys WRT54G2 router to try on a temporary basis.
With this router installed my Internet was working very nicely but I was still skeptical. Like I told the two gentlemen, my other router worked great for two days before dropping out again. The guy told me that he would leave their router at our house over the weekend with the instructions to give it a real workout. He said that he wanted us to put it under as much stress as we could to force a malfunction so we would have peace that it is indeed the router that was the problem. I grudgingly agreed to the terms convinced that it was going to fail before long.
Well it has been three days and I have been running multiple video streams simultaneously 24 hours a day. The Internet has not dropped even one time leaving me to admit that it was my brand new $180.00 router that was failing. I guess it is possible that I could have purchased a lemon. I am sure these routers are mass produced and there are bound to be a few that fail. This post is an attempt to fulfill a promise I made to all parties involved. That promise was to post a glowing review of Cox Communications if they could get my persistent problem resolved. I am not only doing this because I gave my word but also because they really do deserve the praise.
This company had the foresight to to put employees on Twitter and other social networking sites to monitor the keyword “Cox”. None of these people were contacts of min so they had to be searching for the word “Cox” to have stumbled on my posts of frustration. These individuals did not sit there and ignore my please but took the initiative to contact me directly. They stayed with me until the problem was fixed. I never thought that Cox was doing me wrong before, but was convinced that because I live in an older neighborhood that the infrastructure was old and frail. I knew that Cox was capable of delivering a quality service because I have many family and friends that are customers and they were very satisfied. I just wanted to give credit to them and tell them that I am very loyal to those that treat me right. I will stay with Cox and tell others how they were patient and just as persistent to get this intermittent problem resolved. Every one of them deserve a pat on the back in my eyes. Thanks Cox!
Tags: Cox Communications, Cox High Speed Internet, Internet, problems, quality
My oldest son was born on February 6, 1991 making him 19 years old tomorrow. It is an amazing eye opener to show just how fast time goes by. My son has grown up so fast that I can hardly believe it. I wish the best for him just as every parent wants for their children. I am very proud of him and amazed that he is only one year away from leaving the teens. He has been through some rough times lately but the future looks to be an improvement. I hate that he has to work on his birthday. Happy Birthday Kevin!
Also on the same day tomorrow our ham radio tower is coming down. Nearly every ham radio operator’s dream is to have a tower like mine. Most would love to have a tall antenna that can be used to communicate long distances. I am no exception to this rule though we have decided to sacrifice this massive antenna for a new home. I feel that a home will sell for higher price without having a 70 foot antenna towering over the house. For this reason we have decided to take the tower down and sell it. The buyer was supposed to take the tower down two weekends ago but could not when his help was not available. Then last weekend we had a major winter storm. Well this weekend is the time to bring it down after nearly seven years. That tower was installed August 9, 2003 and will be coming down February 6, 2010.
Today we saw the sun for the whole day for the first time in over a week. It was strange to see the blue sky and enjoy the sight of the melting snow. We have been covered in snow and ice for a week. This was our second major winter storm for the season. I would like to believe that it is over but it is not likely because the winter has more than a month left. I use caution when complaining about the cold winter because I know how hot the summers can be. It is only a matter of time before it gets too hot so we need to enjoy the cool weather while it is here. I better get this posted before I dose off. I have been up for more than 20 hours so I am getting drowsy. Thanks for dropping by.
Well the sun came today out for the first time in a week. This is a picture of a huge icicle that was hanging from my front porch yesterday. When I came home from work today it was gone. As cool as it looked, I am glad to finally see this stuff melting away. We get snow and ice occasionally in Oklahoma but it usually does not stay around too long. That is why we are crying so much by having the ground covered for a week. You can see my poor palm tree on the left just buried by the snow. I sure hope it survives but I am certainly concerned about it. This icicle was not an isolated case as my neighbors all had them hanging from their roofs. If you want to see the whole collection, just click on the photo and it will take you over to Flickr.
You will not believe this but the sun was shining when I came out of work this afternoon. After a week of clouds with snow on the ground I thought it was never going to warm up. It actually made it up to 43 degrees today. The last week has been cold and miserable. It is difficult to work on the house when it is cold and wet outside. The roads were clear yesterday though our baby school administrators closed the schools again for the fourth straight day. I sure hated that we didn’t have them in charge when I was a kid. They actually closed the school one day this year because it was cold outside. I have never heard of such a thing. In the last five years I have noticed that the Oklahoma City metro schools have closed for an entire week on several occasions due to weather. When I was a kid, we had snow days but not two or more in a row. It must be nice.
Earlier I posted about my Internet dropping out non stop. I posted about it on Twitter and it is amazing how much they have been trying to help me. So far I have had three people call me on the phone to help out. They have been very friendly and anxious to help. Tomorrow I have a technician coming over to check it out. I am confident that it will be fixed soon. As most of you know, I could live without my television before I could live without my computer. It is time to get this fixed once and for all. I have been pleasantly surprised how helpful they have been. I am anxious to get this over with.
This morning we got out of the house to survey the storm mess. I took some photos this morning to see some of the ice. As you can see this picture was taken looking directly into the front door of the house. I knew I better take this photo first thing in the morning because I have two teenage sons that would certainly remove these from the house and use them for swords. I am sure you all can remember when you were kids doing the same thing. As pretty as the snow and ice are, I am ready for it to be over. I am ready for some warmer, snow free ground. This makes two major winter storms we have had this winter. We almost always have a couple snow falls each year but nothing of this magnitude. If you click on the photo, it will take you to my Flickr page where you can see the rest of them.
Tags: ice, ice cicles, snow, weather
We had Cox High Speed Internet installed a couple months ago and at first the performance was outstanding. After about a month my Internet started dropping constantly to a point that it was really getting on my nerves. It was very strange because it was not losing connection completely but only the web. I could still use Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger etc. but the web would be off. Every time I would reset the modem and router, I would get my service back but only for a short time. I would find myself resetting them four or five times a day. What I was using was…
Motorola SBV5222 Cable modem with phone service.
Two desktops hard wired to the router and up to three laptops on the wireless portion of the router.
The router was set to clone the MAC code of the primary PC. The router had wireless security set to WPA. As I said before, the Internet worked very well for a while. After several weeks of dealing with this, Two weeks ago I bought a new, higher quality router with the hopes that it may fix the problem. This new router is a D-Link DIR-825 Extreme "N" and was set up in the same configuration as the Belkin was. After this change, the service was once again very reliable for a couple days. Once again I started losing connection again and again to the point that I was losing connection every five minutes. This time it is not just the web but all Internet on all computers. The good thing is that with this new router, it would start the Internet back up without any intervention from me after about a minute. Today I became so fed up that I began to believe that it was the wiring coming into the house. I stood out in the pouring snow today installing a new cable from the gray box into the house. This change made no difference. The dropping out was consistently about every three minutes.
I was about to scream I was so mad. I finally broke down and called Cox and followed their automated system. It had me go through the reset process again and then asked me if I was able to load my web site and I said yes. It came to the conclusion that it was my router just as I thought they would. I finally gave up and reinstalled the old Belkin router after that. I have now had a non stop streaming video playing for more than two hours of http://www.twitlive.tvand it has not dropped yet. I am still very skeptical that my problem is fixed because I have not done anything to fix it. I am using the same router that I was fed up with a few weeks ago that was losing web connection resulting in me buying the new router. I am also very skeptical the problem is ONLY my router. I know it is easy for those to jump to conclusions that my service issues are related to the ice/snow storm but this has been happening long before that.
One important piece of information that may be of help. The photo below shows the cable line behind my house during the ice storm of 2007. Since this was taken, several branches were broken off the tree to the right breaking this cable line in two. Cox came out and replaced the stretch of cable between the two power poles with a black cable. The older wire on both sides of this patch are silver cable. This patch is still there today. I have since had this massive tree cut down because these ice storms are becoming a regular occurrence.
Another thing to point out is that OG&E came out and replaced this power pole with another one right beside it. They cut off the top portion of the old pole that you see in this picture. They left the bottom half of the pole in my yard with the Cox cable still attached. You can see this in the photo below. If you look to at the short pole on the left you can barely see the Cox line still attached to the old pole. This was taken September 2008. The cable is still in this configuration to this day. The new pole has a brand new transformer on it.
This neighborhood was built around 1948 so we have issues with other utilities as well.
I have many friends and family that have Cox Internet and are very satisfied. They all tell me they are using multiple computers also but not having the problems that I am having. They say they are using multiple computers but I wonder if they are really using them the way we are. We use them simultaneously with streaming video on a regular basis. It is a completely different thing to have two computers on a network while only using one at a time. I am convinced that my service will drop again and that it is only a matter of time. I am at a total loss as to what the problem is. I am not a total novice with computers but I am willing to concede that I am lost.
I am very loyal to people that treat me right as I have been a T-Mobile customer since 2000. If you can help me fix this problem I will see to it that I spread the word far and wide what a great company Cox is. I just want reliable service, that is all. If you can help me fix this nagging issue, I would be grateful.
Thanks,
Paul
UPDATE: The Internet lasted until the next morning when I started uploading six pictures that I took of the icicles this morning to Flickr. I managed to get two of the six uploaded before I lost connection. I reset the modem and router six more times before getting the remaining four pictures uploaded. This is very irritating though I do know this time it was triggered by my uploading pictures.
On January 28, 2010 we started off the morning dry and cold. Before long the rain moved in and the temperature dropped. By 10:00 AM the boss had decided to send everyone home because the roads were getting icy. It took us a whole hour to get from our parking lot to the gate to get off base. As the day went on we had more and more rain and later changed to sleet. It appeared that we had dodged the worst of the storm because the sleet does not stick to tree limbs and power lines. From the weather reports it sounds as if the worst of the storm was in Southwestern Oklahoma. Both my sister at Ft. Sill and my sister in-law at Altus AFB lost their power and are still sitting in the dark as of the time I post this. These ice storms are becoming a regular thing. You may remember the ice storm in December 2007 where the Oklahoma City area was hit the hardest. We were without power for a week so I can certainly sympathize with them losing their power.
This morning I woke up to find that we are off work again. This is nice to have a day and a half off work without having to take vacation time. My wife and I have decided that now we are off work so it can stop now. The snow can go away so we can have a nice week end. It is not listening to us. I need to call out Cox Cable to fix my line to the house. My Internet has some serious issues and needs to be redone. I know for a fact the problem is not my network. Well better get this posted before the Internet goes off again.
Tags: cable, ice, Internet, malfunction, snow, storm, weather
Man! I am so fed up with these Internet issues. I have had DSL and Cable service, four routers, wired and wireless, new modems and my Internet continues to drop out again and again and again. We have two desktops and three laptops and we have dropouts on both wired and wireless. Every piece of hardware in our network has been replaced, even computers. This problem has been going on for several years. Tonight is a particularly bad night with my Internet struggling to stay on for five minutes at a time. The only thing that I can think of is that my old house and power lines are flaky. Our wires are above ground and have been through countless thunderstorms and ice storms. I have a power transformer on the power pole in my backyard. I just noticed this evening that my cable Internet line coming from the pole has no ground on it.
I am so tired of this ongoing problem. Last week we bought a brand new expensive router and the dropouts continued. At least with the new router, the dropouts are able to fix themselves after a few minutes. Before I had to reboot the router and the modem just to get it to come back on. I can tell you I just want to scream like a little girl. When we pay $50.00 a month for ten years for service, you would hope that we could have decent service. It looks like moving out of here is the only way we are going to get it fixed. I just needed to vent some more.
Thanks for listening.
Have you ever noticed how people that have pit bulls always have huge ego issues and then tie there dogs to heavy weights? These people remind me of the macho types from high school that walk around holding their arms out strutting. These are the guys you see that like to tell you how someone looked at them the wrong way and they straightened them out. If there are any people that get on my nerves worse than liberals it is these kind. My neighbor is the typical pit bull dog owner. They leave their dog outside in the cold rain and snow. They chain the dogs to a heavy tire, transmission or something else heavy. I am convinced these kind of people get the dog for the sole purpose to protect their drugs or other illegal activities they are doing.
The poor dog next door comes and jumps at the fence at me when I go out into the backyard but then calms down almost begging for attention. I am not a dog person but I can see the loneliness in his eyes. He is left out in the cold, virtually abandoned just so the losers in the house can get a warning when the police or any other concerned citizen approaches the neighborhood. These people want a dog that will protect their sorry rear ends while they ignore them. I hate to rant about them but I see it again and again. These rent houses are just new faces with the same type of people. If you are not going to spend any time with the dog, then why have him or her?
Back in high school I had a friend that had a pit bull dragging around a huge tire rim in the backyard. I asked him why he had the dog dragging the rim around and he told me that he was trying to make the dog stronger. I have often asked myself why would someone want to make the dog stronger. People do not want a strong dog to be a pet. A watch dog that is ignored and abandoned out in the yard is just wrong as far as I am concerned. If you need a watch dog, you could use a Chihuahua. A watch dog will make noise to alert you to the presence of an unwanted person so that you can take action. Having a large dog out in the yard that is abused like this is not only mean to the dog but is also a liability. If the dog ever gets out and bites someone, they are putting themselves at risk of a lawsuit. Okay, I have complained long enough. I just had to vent.