Station down with network changes

Duane_AC5AA

I dropped my ISP and moved to T-Mobile Home Internet. Everything in the house works very well except my station. The modem and router for my prior ISP were in the shack and the 6600, Maestro, and PC all plugged into the ports on the router. The T-Mobile unit had to be elsewhere in the house, and the Wi-Fi signal was too weak for the rig to pick it up, so I purchased a Linksys Wi-Fi extender with the intent of wiring all 3 units to its lan ports. Ok, that almost worked. Problems arose with WSJT-X which would start to transmit and then drop back to receive anytime from 1-2 seconds to 10 seconds or so. Experimenting with,power at 0 and into a dummy load convince me it’s not an RFI issue. Ok, let’s try a 5 port TPLink switch for the rig/PC connections and connect it to the Wi-Fi extender. Now the PC can’t see the rig. I know I’m missing something here but have run out of gas trying to narrow it down.

Apology for the long description, but any suggestions of where to look next would be appreciated. I’m far from a network genius! PS - I do not use or need SmartLink.

73, Duane

Ted VE3TRQ

Duane, are your extenders and switches (TPLink is usually a router) all on the same network segment? I.e. do they all have the first 3 “dot” numbers the same? Often the different manufacturers if they route use different network subnets, that is 192.168.1,****, 192.168.8.****, etc. If you were on those two, they would not talk to one another unless some work was done. Of course that does not explain the wsjt-x dropouts on tx, UNLESS you were connected from your PC to the radio via flaky or unstable WiFi.

Good luck sorting this out.

Duane_AC5AA

Thanks, Ted, I’ll check that. I think either netstat or ipconfig should give me that info. Best case was with all 3 enet lines plugged into the Linksys extender, so I’d think all were wired connections. Same as with the earlier TPLink router. Thanks for something f to check for.

73, Duane

Duane_AC5AA

Oh, one more comment - the 5 port gigabit switch is a TPLink. I purchased it because of such great experience with the TPLink router I previously used.

Ted VE3TRQ

A switch should definitely allow the connected devices to talk to each other. However, all your devices still need to get an IP address from your router - the switch won’t help with that. Be sure wherever your router is, the switch has access to it, and it is reliably handing out DHCP address reservations to all attached devices.

And I agree that generally TPLink devices have been reliable, Duane.

Mike-VA3MW

All I can add to the above is to make sure your Range Extender is in Bridge Mode and not having its clients on its own subnet.

73

Duane_AC5AA

Hmm, thanks for the comments, Mike. I had it working for one night and now I’m broken again. I removed the switch from the configuration and again have radio, Maestro and PC plugged into the range extender’s ports. I have the IP addresses shown in the photos below. I disabled the PC and Maestro WiFi to force everything too use the Ethernet. If I ping the other two devices from the PC, the radio responds as expected but the Maestro does not. I don’t know what could cause this. Here are the two pics showing the network stats.

Duane_AC5AA

One more bit of data - the radio and Maestro are “talking” fine, it’s just the PC to Maestro missing. I replaced the Maestro’s enet cable just to be sure - no change. Here are the ping results.