Had a minor flood at the VE3LSR site this past week. The rains and melting, coupled with the frozen ground saw us mopping up another 80 litres of water from the floor today.
Fortunately the water alarm we installed a few years ago notified us by email and VA3VD organised a cleanup. There was no damage due to the flood to any radio or computer equipment but exercise was had by both Dave (VA3VD) and Chuck (VA3SD).
We have a new plan for this summer that will involve some digging. We will let you know when to show up at the site!
The Wet/Dry Vacuum we used to collect the water from the floor decided to quit during this latest exercise, so we are on the lookout for anyone with a surplus wet/dry vacuum, preferably in the 5gallon size the we can use at the repeater site. We need to leave it there so that any of the responsible people can respond when we get an alarm. Let us know if you have one that we can use. Email us at
As many of you will know, the Procomm Net has been suffering with packet loss causing some of the transmissions to be garbled and unintelligible. Some of the more technical people involved will be trying a new hub to connect the Procomm Net repeaters this coming Thursday March 28, 2019. Instead of connecting to node 2248 they will be using node 2200. Our system automatically connects the UHF repeater to node 2248 just before 8:00 pm so we will try to manually effect the change just after it connects. An assessment will be done after the net to see what improvements, if any, are noticed and to determine next steps. Please be patient as we try to properly diagnose the issues.
The following regulation indicates we, as amateur radio operators, retain an exemption to the Hand Held Devices portion of the Distracted Driving Legislation until January 1, 2021. It is suggested that all amateurs keep a copy of their license as well as a copy of this regulation in their vehicle.
The regulation can be found here.
LSR's ISP was in the process of cleaning up their IP space, and requested we update our IP address to a new area. We happily obliged, and went through the processes required. There was very little down time identified and the process went generally smoothly.
While tackling this process, our technical admin team took the opportunity to put additional measures in place to enhance security and spam prevention - We added DKIM and DNSSEC services (and fixed a few bugs while at it). This should help with ensuring email from LSR gets to where they need to be.
After a couple days worth of work, VE3LSR D-Star is fully upgraded and on new infrastructure. There might be a little more tweaks to do, however the worst of the work is over.
G2 -> G3 Upgrade
We decoupled the G3 registration server from the rest of the systems. This is now a fully stand alone system that only does registration. At the same time, it was upgraded from the G2 version to the G3.
ircddbgateway upgrade
This was challenging. We've settled on using virtualization, and dockerization for our systems and services. Where ever possible, we build systems using a micro-service design. IE; One "container" per service. The team was able to get ircddbgateway running inside a container making future upgrades clean, and easy.
All of our work is placed into open source!
You can find all our docker work, online in the docker hub - https://cloud.docker.com/u/ve3lsr/ -- Even the build scripts are open source! Click on a project, and find the github link to be taken to the builds.