October ARES Meeting

Well this evening we had our ARES meeting up at the Claiborne County Hospital's Education Building. We went over our thoughts on our SET operation over this last weekend, discussed the rotation on our Nets for Monday night, and as a treat, Bruce (KI4QIS) took us over to the hospital to show us the radio equipment at the hospital that is used during emergency situations. This equipment was donated/bought for the hospital by FEMA and is maintained by our ARES group.

The equipment in use is an ICOM 706 MkIIG. On the roof are a few antennas that are used with the radio: a 2meter verticle, a UHF antenna, a J-Pole for 2 meters, and a foldable dipole. We got to fire up the radio and Bruce made contact with Dave (KI4NSA) while he was out mobile after the meeting on 2 meters. We then tuned around on HF and learned the issue of the dipole as Bruce and Rick (NX6R) has told us about before. It is rather noisy.

After checking out the radio, Bruce then took us up on the roof to see the antennas. Upon reaching the antenna site, we noticed immediately what the problem with the noise is. The dipole runs parallel with power lines that are about 50 feet away. Additionally, there are two poles both with sets of transformers. So with seeing that Bruce and I may make a weekend project of moving the dipole, of course all of our ARES members are more than welcome to come out when we do this. Bruce also demonstrated a problem with the J-pole having a bit of noise. I think that Bruce is correct in that there is probably some water in the coax as the connector from the antenna to the coax is not sealed in any way. That will be something else we shall remedy when we move the dipole.

I'd also like to mention that we had a visitor join us on the tour and one of our other members as well, Harold (N2BFD) along with Robin (AJ4IJ), and Ashby (KJ4EGJ).

Until next time,
73 de AJ4JD
Tim

My first time as Net Control

This past Monday was my first time being a Net Control Operator. On Monday nights at 8:00pm EDT on the 147.360 repeater in our area, the Claiborne/Union County ARES holds either a regular training net or weather net. Bruce (KI4QIS) asked me if I could take the net for him on this night, and of course I agreed.

In preparation I got a preamble, some net logs, and some material to go over printed out. I decided that since winter was around the corner, I'd go over some winter information about frostbite, extreme cold, and other various cold weather info. I read over a page from a winter weather package that can be found at NOAA's website at the following URL: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/winterstorm/winterstorms.pdf.

So Monday night came, and the Net went off without a hitch. Of course, I was pretty nervous. I think my palms, feet, arm pits, and knee pits were all sweating. However, after the net was over, everyone commented on how well of a job I had done. I was very appreciative of the 20+ check-ins and all the nice comments from everyone. Since then I've been signed up through our ARES group to take every other Emergency Weather training net.

So if you are in the area, please feel free to tune into the 147.360 repeater on Monday nights at 8:00pm. We swap between ARES training and Emergency Training every week. If you tune, you're likely to catch Robin (AJ4IJ), and Dave (KI4NSA) on the ARES nets, and Bruce or me on the weather nets.

Until next time,
73 de AJ4JD