My vp reception dropped 30 % to about 63% on one unit and 32% on another, even with 2 ac inside repeaters that normally were fine. I went about the neighborhood and notice that I now have 3 ham towers , one being about 1 street over . This really sucks.
I still get data, but I wonder if I put an external solar repeater outside the house and use that to relay signal into the house repeaters, would that be a viable solution? I still get data but the percentages go from the above down to zero at times. I have the retrofit extreme kit on board and had thought maybe that was going bad, even with a new battery. I took the console outside to measure packet reception and even if I put the console right by the iss antenna I could get anything, so that is what led me to think the retrofit was going bad . But now seeing the three towers near by and that the trees have dropped their leaves , makes me wonder if it is these three towers.
I am thinking of attaching the police scanner and have it scan the ham band to my lap top to see if there is a pattern to the reception. But the loss is all day long. So trying to catch a frequency is going to be tough because the values of the loss of reception is all day .
Open to suggestions. No, I don’t think I can attach chain to their towers and pull them down in the dead of the night, or pray to the ice gods to bring them down either. RATS
Is the loss all night long too? It’s hard to imagine that your local hams would be transmitting 24 hours a day. The signal strength is a square law thing, so if you are having bad reception with the console right by the ISS I would be surprised if the problem is something external to the system.
my gut feeling is that it is with the retrofit kit board with everything else being secondary. I am hoping that Davis will send me a replacement kit board and I can deal with that . What the history is that before this I had the unit as is , and a soil moisture/ leaf wetness unit. Now that has three temperature and three soil moisture sensors in addition to the leaf wetness sensor. I decided that I wanted to send data to the Globe.gov program for education. Their requirements were 4 moisture probes and 3 temperature units. So I had to buy a new station without the leaf wetness. ( that is a whole different saga, humorous to a point.)
Very soon after adding the replacement unit, the overall reception percentage dropped from 95and above to 54, then 34. percent . So I figured that maybe it might be the new sensor crashing signals, although the values were 85% most of the time. So… I took the unit off line, discharged the capacitor and nothing improved. Since the soil was saturated anyway, no loss in data. At this point I began to wonder if maybe somehow I rotated the ISS out of some finite range, although that wasn’t the case.
Plan B was to replace the cr123 battries, so I did that just in case. Brought the soil unit back on line and things were bouncing around 85%, when suddenly about the 11th of November I get a rapid from zero to 100% in values for about 6 days and now the data is about 65%. So. Here I am wondering if the retrofit board might be bad. I have two display units, so I exchanged them, took both outside to see if I could find any location between that would present a better signal. I didn’t locate any area that I could get the signal to produce a string of packets. It would go to about 10 then reset. So I decided to put one unit as close to the ISS unit as I could get and of course na-da. I even took one unit around the house and Idid get signals until I got to the far side and of course as expected no transmission received.
I have two AC repeaters in the house. a while back I had similar problems before the retrofit kit and found that the repeaters did the trick. But now , not a thing seems to work. Enter the grand daughter … she decides she wants popcorn chicken from the Col. Sanders. The closest to me is near Drake University, so I head up the street and see this hideous Ham tower, bright and new by this house, with some of the most interesting antenna bolted on, looks like two vertical pipes, something new. This would explain a lot of the noise in that neck ofthe woods. I get back and have a visual from my yard to that unit and I can see it is about a street over. I went to the FCC data base and see that it isn’t listed as far as license, but two others down the street are. So here enters worry. It could be the ISS being a failing board. that is possible, although no one will admit that they have had problems with the unit. the other could be the new tower causing a problem. The other two towers have been around for 5 to 6 years so no problem that way. I could add an solar repeater for outside the wall near where I have the 2 ac units if that would help. Right now I have more than I should have investedi in the unit and on the way I have the leaf wetness sensor being repaired ( er…I dropped it in the mud when the soil augar was stuck and it must have been damaged inthe process… being repaired by davis) and a wireless temperature station to measure soil surface temperature. I figure then I should have more sensors to make the rest of the hair go gray.
I am just tossing out the line for suggestions other than buy a new vantage pro 2 and be happy. I am waiting for the vantage pro 55 to come out. ( well they could have such a beast some year)
So some of the ham towers are really cell sites? Are you on a hill?
I’ve had 3 iss replacements so far, reading the saga I think that would be my guess in this situation too.
P.S. I see there’s another thread on here something like “trouble shooting vantage pro”, clearly the guy needs a bigger gun :lol:
[quote author=aardvark link=topic=6497.msg43146#msg43146 date=1102220149]
My vp reception dropped 30 % to about 63% on one unit and 32% on another, even with 2 ac inside repeaters that normally were fine.