KD0TLS: APRS update 3/19/22

  Maybe it's a sign of Spring, but several things have developed this week or so across the State on APRS. 

• The RX-only gateway in Isle (near Mille Lacs Lake), W0KGK-10, has returned to service this week. It's been off-air for a couple of months, which has left that area without gating coverage for digipeated traffic. Its presence makes digipeaters such as MHTOWA, AITKIN, and K0YTH-11 much more reliable. Now would be a good time for someone to set up a small digipeater around Mora, because there's a gateway to service it.
• WB0KUG-10 came back on-air this week near Alexandria. This is a digipeater with a solid 15-mile coverage radius in an area with no direct coverage at all. Though it still seems to be struggling somewhat (no packets received for an entire day), I'm hopeful that it will resolve whatever issues it currently faces. It's done so before.
• I neglected to point out earlier that the KC0TAF-1 I-Gate south-west of Long Prairie (Grey Eagle) had earned the privilege of connecting to the core APRS-IS servers for its reliability.
• The Battle Lake digipeater KC0ZZQ-5 has also resurrected itself once more. Though operation was sporadic for a few days, it now seems stable and is reaching distant gateways. I'd love to see a gateway in Fergus Falls or Wadena that could use this machine to its full advantage. 
• After a brief outage, the AE5E-7 gateway in Thief River Falls has resumed operation. This TX gateway handles a surprising amount of message traffic, so it's important that it stays in operation. Still, it hasn't gated any packets in over two days (except for messages), so it may not be completely restored yet.
• The TX gateway in southern MN, MTLAKE, has handled a highly impressive 13K+ packets so far this month. This is very unusual for a rural I-Gate, but it's pretty much the only gateway for the south-western part of the State. For comparison, the KD0JOU-2 digipeater in Litchfield has only handled a tenth of that amount. Also for comparison, the core gateway/digi W0YC-5 in the metro has handled 13.1k packets over the same period.
• Interesting to note: the core gateways N0QVC-1 and W0NE-3 have gated 23.8k and 32.8k packets respectively so far this month. Neither has been upgraded to a core server connection on APRS-IS. The algorithm that makes that decision seems to be mysterious indeed.
• In the metro, AE0KW-1 in Hopkins has sprung back to life. I believe this machine has issues in the colder weather, so its reliability should improve now.
• Big news for the metro: the TX gateway N0KFB-1 has returned to the air. It was down for a week or so due to a computer failure. This is a station that runs a mere 0.1W into an antenna at only 15 feet. If anyone thinks that you need 50W and a 50-foot tower to run a successful metro gateway, this station proves them wrong. 2.2k packets handled so far this month, in spite of being down.

Current metro infrastructure 3/19