On Thursday, October 23rd, the Wireless Society of Southern Maine’s Emergency Communications Team (ECT) arrived at the Cumberland County EMA to find the Internet down to the radio room. This also affected the EMA’s guest network.
This left the packet radio node, the repeater controller (impacting Wires-X), and the HF and VHF stations’ computers offline during the meeting and the Simulated Emergency Test.
The silver lining was that, despite the lack of Internet connectivity, the ECT was still able to carry out its duties, coordinating our dispatched teams using the UHF repeater in stand-alone mode, the DMR network where much of the network is connected by microwave, and FM simplex; and sending messages between teams and other agencies involved in the event leveraging the nearby KC1JMH packet radio node to send email over radio with Winlink and short sitrep messages with JS8CALL on HF.
The good news is that at about 11:30 on Tuesday, October 29th, Internet connectivity has been restored. If you have been trying to access the packet radio node over SSH, or tried dialing into a Wires-X room on the repeater, you should be able to do so again.
If you have trouble connecting to our resources, please check our status page at: https://status.mainepacketradio.org or this site for news updates on the network.
If you are a sysop of a public node that is connected to the Maine Packet Network, please share your node’s information and status updates with us so that we can share that information.
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