Many of you might have noticed that the ZS-Link Network was offline for large periods of the day, yesterday. Yesterday was one of the most challenging days thus far for the network. It all started when loadshedding was implemented yesterday morning at 8h00 SAST till 10h15. An hour before the power came on for a short while the network commercial power switching unit switched off unexpectedly killing the Internet as well as the AllStar/Echolink node. I immediately tested the battery but it was fully charged. Now why would this unit just switch off. I traced the fault to the LTE router, so I thought. The moment I switch the LTE router in the switching unit would drop out killing all power to everything. In the mean time our mains power came on after loadshedding but only for about 1 minute. I received information that the mains power would be off for several hours as they try to find the problem. I did some fault finding but was unable to test the power unit. Eventually just after 14h00 the mains power was restored but I had other commitments and could not attend to the link outage. Meanwhile thunderstorms were building. I eventually switched to a back up unit and the link network was restored only for a few hours until severe lightning forced me to switch off and unplug everything. We had one bolt of lightning last night that could have solved many of Eskom's power issues. It hit close-by and lit up the Shack in white and blue. I nearly fell of my chair when it happened. Have not experienced such a close strike in this area for a long time.'
Early this morning I installed the backup power system for the GRHub Network link and we are back live again. I will be working on the power switching unit that I build HERE and will connect it permanently to the network. Hopefully this will result in a far better power switching unit than the commercial unit that went faulty.
I apologize for any inconvenience but these things do happen from time to time.
