Your questions answered: OTAP does not work completely

The following question came in via my contact form a few weeks ago:

We have more than 1200 radios in our park so we wanted to manage them with RM. We first used it with OTA Programmation in Digital Mode in addition to USB Programming (still using RM) and it worked pretty well.

As we have now clients using Capacity Plus Single Site, we tried adapting our current MNIS config to work with Capacity Plus Repeaters.

It does not work completely: ARS is still sent correctly by radios to MNIS so RM Device Monitor detects it. The error is when the Device Programmer wants to read or write the radios : it fails with error code 302 (communication with radio cannot be established)

I tried to ping the radios (eg 12.0.0.42 for ID 42) without response in C+. I don't know whether it is normal or not. In addition it seems the tunnel don't work well, pinging the 192.168.10.1 address isn't working.

Firstly, make sure that MNIS has been configured correctly.

This may seem obvious but make sure you have no radios connected to the PC via USB. The 192.168.10.0/24 subnet is also used by radios (default) and this can interfere with MNIS operation.

Check to name sure the correct configuration is saved and selected. Then check to make sure that the MNIS service is running (play button greyed out and service is started in services.msc). If its not running, click play or start the service in the services console.

Once you are successfully able to ping the MNIS tunnel, confirm whether the target radio is reachable by sending it a text message and by replying to the sent message from the source radio.

Make sure the target radio is within RF range and not in another call. Then ping the radio making sure to include the -w 5000 switch to prevent ICMP from timing out.

When the target radio is being pinged, check the radio LED and confirm that it flashes green as if its receiving then sending something.

NB! You cannot read radios using OTAP! You can write but its better if you only make smaller changes with OTAP. You can write big changes using OTAP but this will take much longer and with 1200 radios, this might not be a wise choice.

Another possibility could be Windows Defender Firewall. You could also try turning this off temporarily to check. The firewall doesn't normally block ICMP but it might be blocking OTAP messages.

MNIS and the repeaters should ideally be on the same software release. I've had one case where the MNIS was older than what was in the repeaters and it didn't work despite having a known-good configuration.  

If anything else comes to mind in the meantime, I (or someone else) will post it in the comments.

Please also have a look at this document.