The W0CDS Gateway was down for a couple of days. It is back online now. Due to some serious crazy effort by John N0WBW and Mike Mullarky K7PFJ, plus some of the technicians we know who work for the ISP who's wireless backbone resides at Mt. Thorodin, (riding a sno-cat up Mt. Thorodin in blowing snow/blizzard conditions), it was found that the new UPS installed to protect various gear from the seriously bad power up there, had failed...
The site just munches UPS's and power supplies for lunch. The power bumps (as we all could see when the Gateway rebooted regularly during the early Summer prior to the UPS installation) are really wicked up there. John got permission to plug the multiple systems that were powered off the dead UPS into a much larger and hopefully more stable UPS that the ISP utilizes, and he's hunting for a bigger/beefier/won't-die model for the ham cabinet gear to install later when the weather/road/etc is in much nicer shape. He reports that sno-cat is now the only way up there, and this will probably remain true until Spring... just like most years. (In January of 2007 a Bell JetRanger helicopter was utilized. That's an option the ham community certainly can't afford to pay for, but that was for a commercial customer visit.) Send your thanks to John for going up there on Sunday. Centennial Airport clocked 39 knot gusts so I don't even want to take a guess as to what it was doing atop Mt. Thorodin around 6000' higher up. Winds at 9000' MSL and 12000' MSL out of the west were forecast in the high 30-knot-range via the Aviation weather outlets. I think the forecasts were conservative on Sunday compared to how strong the frontal passage/formation of the trough East of the Rockies really was. You guys are only a LITTLE nuts, John! :-) Thanks for going up there. 73, -- Nate Duehr, WY0X n...@natetech.com CC: DSTAR_DIGITAL list in case folks were trying to call Denver D-STAR friends/associates. BCC: John and Mike
