CY9C

When CY9C began operations back on August 26, there were huge pileups. On 30-meter CW, the pileup was at least 5 kHz wide. One of the reasons for this, of course, is that St. Paul Island is part of Canada and not that far from most of the United States. That made it a lot more accessible to hams here in the U.S.

I waited, and on the evening of August 31, I actually heard them calling CQ on 30 meters managed to work them on the second call.

As it turns out, I probably could have skipped it entirely. I just checked Logbook of the World (LOTW) and see that I worked CY9C on August 21, 2016; CY9SS on July 5, 2005; ;and Cy9A on July 31, 2003.

VUs in the log

For some reason—maybe because I don’t really have a DX station—I had never managed to work anyone in India. Well, in the last  month or so, I’ve managed to work two Indians, VU2GSM and VU2TMP. VU2TMP has QSLed via LOTW, making my current DXCC count 174.

AllStarLink

And now for something completely different, as they used to say on Monty Python’s Flying Circus….

Several months ago, the University of Michigan Amateur Radio Club (UMARC) upgraded their repeater system (145.23-, 100Hz). As part of this upgrade, they became a node on the AllStarLink network, which they have been proudly announcing on their Sunday night net. 

After last Sunday’s net, I decided to find out how to access the network. The first thing I did was to take a look at the UMARC website, or I should say websites. UMARC actually has four different web pages. Unfortunately, none of them had any information on how to access the AllStarLink network.

Then, I asked one of the club’s advisors. He wasn’t really sure how to do it either, and advised me to search for the information on the web. I did this and found a Beginner’s Guide, but this isn’t really what I was looking for. The Beginner’s Guide directs someone on how to set up their own node, not really how to use the network.

I kept looking and found the page AllStarLink Standard Commands. This is exactly what I was looking for. This page describes the DTMF sequences a user needs to connect and disconnect from nodes. Fortunately, the UMARC repeater uses this standard command set.

Next, I had to find a repeater to connect to. That shouldn’t be so difficult, I reasoned, since the network boasts that they have 34,720 users and 35,345 nodes. I started with the AllStarLink Node List. I was able to connect to a couple of repeaters, but most of them seemed either offline or inaccessible for some reason. One of the active nodes that I was able to connect to was WW8GM, the General Motors Amateur Radio Club repeater in Detroit, but I got no reply to my call there.

So, I asked on /r/amateurradio if anyone had suggestions for active or interesting nodes.  I was directed to a list of “keyed nodes,” which I guess are nodes that are currently active. Currently, this page is showing 30-35 active nodes.

One of the nodes that looked promising was a repeater in Seattle. The page showed that it was connected to at least a dozen other repeaters. When I connected to that repeater, I heard a net with everyone giving weather reports! I didn’t find that very interesting, so I quickly disconnected.

I’m told that the UMARC repeater connects to a net of student stations on Saturday afternoon. I’ll be listening for that, but really would like to know of other interesting nets or nodes on the AllStarLink network. If you know of any, please comment below.