Contesting with Flex6600 and PGXL experience

Hi Sergey

Sometimes it is hard for me to reply to these since I often have to wear 2 hats.  The work one and the Ham one.  This is Mike the Ham responding.

I can't say I've ever seen the same thing happen to me, but I have had a loss of communications and that will result in some strange events.

It took me a while to figure it out, but in order to do it, I had to have a bunch of sessions running Ping continuously to show that in my case, my network hiccuped.  I would ping the radio from the PC, or the Amp from the PC, but at the same time I would have the PC ping the switch and another one on the router.  I had window running ping EVERWHERE.  

This is what it looks like pinging the radio from the house computer over the VPN.  30ms round trip for 300km's. 

C:UsersMike>ping -t 192.168.110.76

Pinging 192.168.110.76 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=31ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=33ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=36ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=41ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=41ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=47ms TTL=62
Reply from 192.168.110.76: bytes=32 time=34ms TTL=62

Eventually, I had a loss of communication while I was watching, and what I found out is that the Switch I was using actually crashed and rebooted.  The key point was when a RPI that was not part of anything radio was pinging the network router, and it lost communications.  As well, everything else failed to communicate with its partner.  I hope that makes sense.

That gave me the clue I needed to debug it.   Eventually, I replaced all cables with commercially made CAT5E (I had a few of my own) and I went to another switch.   That part was hard as the switch has to 'work' and be RF quiet.  

That fixed the remote base.

Next, at home where I operate from 6M up, the same thing.  It turned out that the TP-Link TL-SG-1016G doesn't like 6M.  Boom.. it goes offline running 6M FT8 or MSK144.  Too bad, as I like that switch.  

So, I highly recommend you look closely at what Neal wrote.  I should try the same thing at my home QTH and see if I can measure any currents.

You might want to try the same ping exercise while transmitting and see if you start to get some packet loss.

Mike va3mw