About hamradio

Yep!  you are correct.  When I was having trouble with my Verizon 3G ISP, called them. I had a 13 element beam at 50 feet pointed to their tower (Cradlepoint router and PC770 express card).  The measured EVDO signal strength was at -65dbm a lot of the time but would also drop to less than -125 dbm.  No fade, just died. - Then back up after an hour or two.  The person at support totally ignored the -65 dbm report and just kept repeating the mantra that I was in a fringe reception area - and their towers never had any problems.  How frustrating...  Here comes HN! ... View more

Hope you get the antenna work done OK.   I am using  3 wire ants.  2 @ 68', 1 @ 110' -- Tower to 80' oak trees.  More details at albe24.com. Woody - KZ4AK ... View more

I certainly agree that too many sites cram way too much graphic content in their opening / index page.  Not much we can do about that.   Sometimes I long for the times when I was accessing a local RBBS with my dialup CP/M (pre DOS) computer!  OTOH, no worldwide access without expensive long distance charges...  Guess I am showing my age.   The Fbook errors still happen from time to time.  Either timeouts or the ssl_error_too_long....   OTOH, if one is persistent it will eventually load.  Changing the DNS didn't fix those  ...But multiple reloads will.   Since page loads were so slow before I was throttled back, I get the impression the problem I have is with the HN earth gateway.  My page (albe24.com) with no load calls from elsewhere, loads pretty quickly.  When I guestioned this with phone support, they sort of ignored me and kept repeating my download speeds were fine.  Most page loads do not take significalnty longer (for lower graphic content pages)  at 0.85Mbps than they did at 30Mbps.   To look at the bright side, lower download speeds hardly impact my usage. ;)     Not using an adblocker but going to look into doing so to see if that helps.  Will report back in about 3 days when my "normal" speed returns.   Woody ... View more

Hello all... No DirecTV connection and FB autoplay has been off for a long time.   Will have to wait a few days until the next usage period (fast speed) is restored to fully evaluate data usage rates and web page load times.  The DNS change may or may not have affected page load times.  ...Not a big enough change to notice right now.  Will see what the perfomance is like when speed is back up.  S ince the DNS change, have not received the error " ssl_error_rx_record_too_long" (or something close to that) when logging on to Fbook - so far, at least .  That was the only site that presented the error.   More usage needed to evaluate that glitch.     With the slow speed, it took 75 seconds to fully load cnn.com, 90 seconds for cnet.com, 40 seconds for qrz.com, 25 for arrl.org, 50 for wunderground.com, and 15 seconds for my web site, albe24.com.   Will be interesting to see what it is like when speed returns.  The graphics don't change much for arrl.org and not at all for albe24.com so they might be best for comparison. Thanks again, Woody ... View more

Oh, FWIW - I am connected to the router via Ethernet. ... View more

Thanks for the tips.  Have changed the HT2000W DNS setting to Cloudflare.  Will see how that does.   Interesting tidbit...    I thought that my 10GB plan would be fine since I don't stream video, except for an occasional Facebook or Youtube video.   At first that was true and my projection was that I should have data remaining at the end of my period.   Then, a few days ago (apparently for no reason I can discover) my data began to drain at an alarming rate.  For a few days, it das disappearing at a rate of >2GB/day.   A few days before the new period, I was throttled back (from 25 - 40 Gbps to  ~ 0.8 Gbps).   The "interesting" thing is that there is almost no difference in the load times for the web sites I usually visit.  Apparently there is a bottleneck, not with streaming downloads, but with HN getting the data to send to me.  Hope the new DNS helps. Thanks all, Woody - KZ4AK ... View more

Just performed several HN speed tests.  At the moment the average is 1.9 down and 1 up.  That sucks, but the slow web page loads have historically occurred with the higher values.  ...Woody ... View more