(This is the second episode in a series of posts to help you discover all the functionality that you might not know exists in your ClearNode, ClearAlpha, ClearZero or ClearRPT. We’re going to publish an episode each Sunday evening – come back and join us each week !)

Continuing on our mission to discover where the action is at, this week we are going to look at the Fleet Last Heard screen. Once again tap on the share menu icon top left of the Your Nodes screen.

Tap on “Fleet Last Heard” in the App Menu – initially you’ll get an empty list – this is a live view and nothing will be listed until a node in the fleet lifts off their HT’s PTT button.

Patience will reward you here – wait a while and the screen will start filling up with entries – the latest will be on the top.

Some things to note here. Only nodes that are connected to other nodes are listed here – if a node is disconnected but receiving on the node transceiver – it will not be listed. Also, “kerchunks” are ignored the transmission has be greater than zero seconds.

The 1st line of each entry tells you the call sign and node number that is receiving on its RF side and thus pushing audio onto the destination, i.e. nodes it’s linked to.

The 2nd line of each entry gives you the timestamp of the end of the transmission and the destination nodes the audio was sent to. If you tagged those destination nodes in your ADD CONNECTION screen, the tag will be displayed in favor of the standard AllStar Number. If the destination is a call sign – it’s likely to be an instance of DVSwitch mobile, Zoiper mobile or RepeaterPhone mobile.

73 … Gerry.

Our supply of Pi 4Bs has landed !

It’s going to be a busy few weeks – we’re expecting to get the first units out around Monday June 5th.

Given that the supply of Pi4s is healthy, but not unlimited, it seems fair to let people reserve their slot in the production cycle.

Version 2 of ClearRPT is nearing completion – still some testing to do and we need to finalize the case design. We’ll open Pre-Orders for ClearRPT in the coming weeks.

Onwards and upwards !

73 … Gerry.

(This is the first episode in a series of posts to help you discover all the functionality that you might not know exists in your ClearNode, ClearAlpha, ClearZero or ClearRPT. We’re going to publish an episode each Sunday evening – come back and join us each week !)

AllStar, EchoLink and the Digital Modes can be a bit overwhelming for the uninitiated … or should I say a little UNDERwhelming ! You’ve gone to all the trouble to understand how all this works, you’ve got it all configured … and now what … where do you go ?

Discovering where the “action is at” can be discouraging to the point some folks give up and go play with a different toy. That’s a shame because there is a whole lot of action out there – it’s a question of where and when !

We’ve deployed a couple tools in the ClearNode system to help you along the path of discovery. In this episode we are going to look at the live connection and disconnection activity monitor.

Fleet connection activity

On the “Your Nodes” screen tap on the “Share” icon in the top left corner to bring up the App Menu

Tap on the “Fleet connection activity” option to bring up a screen that looks across the ClearNode fleet to see who’s connecting where.

You can see right away that there’s definitely some action on the Sierra Foothills system – lots of connects within the last 3 hrs. You can refine your search to a shorter or longer query period – 1 hr, 3 hrs, 24 hrs or 1 week – are you looking for what’s going on right now, or what goes on more generally ?

Let’s say you’re curious about the Sierra Foothills system – go ahead and tap on the Target Name – you will be offered the option to connect to that system right away. Your node “49855” will be connected to “51018” which is the actual node number for the Sierra Foothills system.

In this example the Target systems have real names “Sierra Foothills”, “The Talk Box”, etc. When you first start using your node these will be generic AllStar node numbers. As you get more familiar with your ClearNode you will start tagging those node numbers with names you can more easily recognize – we will cover that process in a later episode. Once you’ve tagged a node number that’s what will be presented here in favor of the generic node number.

Go ahead and give it a try !

73 … Gerry.