December 3, 2020 Club Meeting
Thursday, December 3, 2020 at 7:00 PM Via Zoom. Login sent via email or upon request.
Program: Distributed Multi-operator Contesting
Due to COVID-19, multi-operator stations have been prevented for the major contests. As a result some of the larger contests have started to permit distributed multi-operator entries. These usually have a geographic restriction (perhaps 75 mile radius). The various different stations can enter the contest as through they are a single muylti-operator station, with similar rules:
- One signal per band / mode (just like a physical station)
- Proper serial number sequencing (like a physical station)
- Single entry (just like a physical station)
In order to support this type of contesting the popular logging program N1MM+ can use wide-area-networking (WAN) to coordinate all the stations, bands, modes, scoring, and sequencing. The program will be an open discussion of this new entry category, how to properly coordinate stations, and discussion among club members about who and what contests we might want to participate in this way.
December will be election of officers for the club. We have one candidate for president, so please don’t be afraid to show up at the meeting!
Announced in the December 2020 issue of The Repeater.
Meeting Notes
From the January 2021 issue of The Repeater.
RVARC Meeting Minutes December 3, 2020
Meeting started at 7:00 P.M. via zoom.
Mike (treasurer) reported our bank balance as $4881.76
Election of officers for 2021 were held. Nominations made (and said agreeing to run):
- Pat Cunningham for President
- Don Bennett for Vice President
- Mike Bach for treasurer
- John Armstrong for secretary.
No further nominations were received. After vote of those present, all were elected unanimously to their respective offices.
7:12 PM Don Bennett discussed the current status of license examinations in the Rogue Valley. They have been shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic, the test location had been closed to public use by the fire department. Methods to startup the exams again discussed. Some possibilities:
- Give test to applicants in their automobile. Use FM rig to give instructions to the applicants.
- Use zoom (or something similar) to proctor examinations remotely. This has been done by a few groups, but is labor intensive as each applicant has been separately proctored.
The club needs some form of payment option for this, suggestion made that we could use Paypal to accept credit cards on the club webpage, although Paypal extracts a fee for each transaction. Those present thought that the hit to the club treasury would be small and acceptable given that there would not be a large transaction volume.
7:23 PM Motion seconded and passed: Club investigate a payment and exam process to be used at least until the end of the pandemic.
7:30 PM. Program—discussion on N1MM and remote contesting.
Distributed multi-op contesting is now being accepted for an increasing number of contests due to COVID. All the participants use one callsign, thus there is a need to coordinate the bands used (to avoid multiple signals on one band/mode), check for duplicates, assign serial numbers, collect logs, etc.
Traditionally N1MM assumes that all the stations are on the same local network. It uses this for discovery and communication to all computers. However with remote stations, none of the remotes are on the local network (they have different IP addresses, and need to be routed via the Internet).
A solution is to a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to tunnel the remote stations over the internet to the main location. The VPN makes all the computers appear to be on the same local network, which can them be used by N1MM+.
Possibilities for VPN:
- Use wireguard (support for which is present in the Linux kernel starting at kernel version 5.6). Pro: free, and no per-node cost. Drawback: GUI interfaces and wide platform support are somewhat lacking as it is a new protocol. Complicated configuration may be needed.
- Hamachi VPN. Work has been done by N1MM folks to use the Hamachi VPN to do this, Pros: already integrated into N1MM+. Free. Con: limitation of 5 remote stations (for the free version).
- Zerotier VPN. Pros: up to 50 remote stations (for the free version), easy configuration via the web interface and automatic hole-punching in many user routers/modems. Con: N1MM folks have not tested this. It may work fine, or there might be issues.
Meeting adjourned (missing exact time, but after 8:00 PM).
John took the meeting minutes, transcribed by Tom later. If there are any additions or corrections, please let Tom know, any errors are likely due to mistranscription of John’s notes.
John, KF7UMK, secretary, Tom, N5EG transcribing
