Re: What did I miss in my test condition?

Try pinging the radio to see if it's alive before making the SNMP query?

$ ping -c 3 -W 1 $dead_host >/dev/null 2>&1
$ echo $?
1
$ ping -c 3 -W 1 $live_host >/dev/null 2>&1
$ echo $?
0
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Converting this to perl should be trivial.