Unable to connect Maestro to 6400 via SmartLink over Cox Cable

Ora Smith

My Maestro will connect via Smartlink on an iPhone hotspot (Verizon) with poor quality, but will not connect with my 6400 over Cox Cable (the 6400 is on a CenturyLink DSL system). When running the Maestro on Cox remotely I can see the radio, but it will not connect, in spite of a network test green light. Flex iOS will not connect via Cox either, but will connect via the cellular network After much troubleshooting Help Desk has told me that some ISPs interfere with the Flex data stream and there is no remedy so far. They suggest that I might be able to connect using a VPN bridge consisting of two dd-wrt routers, one on each end. Has anyone else had this problem and did you find a solution?

Robert Lonn

My home and work provider is Cox in San Diego and SSDR and my 6600M both work!

Russ K5OA

I see about same on TWC here, lost connect to Maestro but IPhone is ok and so is local PC at radio site.

Robert Lonn

Ora, I think your QTH is Ohio and you are now at a Ham Convention? Are you trying to use a Cox WiFi Hot Spot?? Do you have full internet Access, Weather Channel , with your windows computer?

Harry W0LS

Did you ever solve this problem...I know someone else having very similar problem.

Thanks
Harry
W0LS

Bob - W7KWS -

I did some testing on this last year & exchanged several emails with Steve Hicks at the time. His feedback indicated the Vita 49 packets were often larger than the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) on the Internet path I was using.

Research indicated that the MTU varies from path to path and from ISP to ISP depending on their hardware & software. A generally accepted safe maximum MTU appears to be just over 1200 Bytes. The Vita 49 packets generated by the radio were often greater than this but never more than 1500. These should have been broken into fragments by the first router & then reassembled at the far end. To let the far end know, I think they set an overhead bit to signal that an incoming packet is to be reassembled.

At one time fragmented packets were considered a security risk. Some ISPs solved this with speacilized software. Others just threw the packets out. Such appeared to be the case at my location using Comcast Northwest, yet, at a friends location using Comcast in the Washington DC area, the packets were passed just fine.

The lesson I learned was that just because something works in one environment, it's not an indication that it will work elsewhere.

Flex resolved my problem in the recent software upgrades by fragmenting all the packets in the radio and reassembling them in the client at the remote control point. Since this always happened, there was no need to set the fragmentation bit and Comcast passed them as ordinary packets.

Harry W0LS

Thanks for the update Bob and glad things are working. Now that you have elaborated on the problem this seems to be different than the one my friend is having trouble with.

Happy New Year...

Harry

Ora Smith

Harry, I have never solved the problem. I sort of ran out of time and interest to work on it, so I am continuing to use by Omni VII for remote work.  My home QTH where the radio is located has relatively slow ADSL (10mb/s down 765k up), so I expect I am not going to be able to operate the Flex remotely even if I can solve the Cox remote access problem (radio is connected to the internet via Centurylink DSL).

Harry W0LS

Hi Ora,
 Well that's too bad that you do not have it working remotely. I know of two others that have the same symptoms as you do and they are trying to get it resolved but so far no luck. Both of them have 6400's and are on CenturyLink DSL. The speed you have at your location should be just fine. I have the same speed here and have no trouble operating my 6700 remotely. One of the guys having the issue opened a trouble case with Flex but so far they have not been able to solve the problem. It appears that there is some common problem here that Flex has not found. Common denominators so far are 6400 and CenturyLink. Don't know if that means anything or not. If I were you I would open a case with Flex.

Thanks,
Harry
W0LS

Ora Smith

Thanks, Harry. I opened a trouble case earlier and they eventually said there was nothing they could do and that I was on my own - disappointing. I actually thought about selling the Flex, but I really do like it.  The weird think about Centurylink is that I have been able to access the Flex remotely over a cell hot spot (Verizon), but only on 20 meters. It connects on other bands, but the audio is terrible. 20 is perfect. Perhaps they send a smaller slice out on that band. OTOH, the last time I tried to connect with a hot spot I got nothing. I have tried connecting to the Flex over a variety of ISPs and nothing worked, which seems to implicate CenturyLink.  

73,

Ora
W9DJ