Socket hangup error using Request or Needle in NodeJS

Question

I am getting a Socket Hangup error when attempting to connect to an external web site, an example of a failing site given below. The code is working for other sites and I can successfully access the test site if I rewrite the code in Python. I am unable to make changes to the external site so am looking to enhance the NodeJS script to handle the connection. Any help appreciated

let request = require("request-promise");
let needle = require("needle");

//Check if can connect to site

    let arrTestCases = ["https://compassandstars.com"];

    for (x in arrTestCases) {
         chkcon(arrTestCases[x])
    }

    async function chkcon(req) {
        let resultJSON = {};
        let data;
        try {
            console.log ("Validating blog " + req);
    //Attempt using RequestPromise, fails with same error
    //      let getURL = await request({
    //          url: req,
    //          headers: {
    //              'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/68.0.3440.106 Safari/537.36' 
    //          }
    ////            headers: {
    ////                'User-Agent': 'ouruseragent',
    ////                'Connection': 'keep-alive'
    ////            }
    //      })

            needle('get', req)

             .then(function(response) {
                resultJSON = {ValidURL: true};
                console.log("URL Validated successfully", response.body);
             })
             .catch(function(err) {
                console.log(err);
             })

        } catch (e) {
            console.log("Bad Blog URL ",e.message);
        } finally {
            console.log("Result: " + JSON.stringify(resultJSON), req);

        }

The error response:

Result: {} https://compassandstars.com
{ Error: socket hang up
    at TLSSocket.onConnectEnd (_tls_wrap.js:1073:19)
    at Object.onceWrapper (events.js:219:13)
    at TLSSocket.emit (events.js:132:15)
    at endReadableNT (_stream_readable.js:1101:12)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:152:19)
  code: 'ECONNRESET',
  path: null,
  host: 'compassandstars.com',
  port: 443,
  localAddress: undefined }

I can recreate the issue using NodeJS 8.10 on AWS Lambda and locally on my machine using NodeJS 9.6.1.

My research indicates it may be an error finding a compatible cipher to make the SSL connection but I'm unable to find out how to force Request to change the request to handle this.