K0SWE Blog

For the past 4 days I was assisting Arapahoe County ARES with the Arapahoe County Fair . I'm not sure what I was expecting, but this event turned out to be very challenging and gratifying! My role was to walk around the fair as part of a team of 2 or 3 and be extra eyes and ears for the sheriff's office and the fair staff. During the course of each day, I ended up averaging about 10 miles walking. We assisted with about 10 lost child incidents where we searched for children or parents; 3 or 4 medicals where we called the event EMTs out into the fair to help people; and asked for sheriff support on a couple of unruly customers. Good times!

The COVID-19 pandemic has of course kept us mostly at home and away from people for over a year now. But with wide-spread vaccinations, the grip of the pandemic is starting to loosen. Case in point: last night, Colorado ARES R1D6 was able to meet in-person for the first time since February 2020! We worked on initiating ARRL ARES Task Books. Most members of the unit have the training to complete Level 1 of the task book without effort, so we worked on some Level 2 skills like front-panel programming a radio, and taking a field report on an ICS-213 with sufficient detail. It was a lot of fun to see folks in-person again!

I've been switching my focus more to the software engineering side of the hobby. I've been getting more and more involved in  Pat  and have been particularly interested in the form templates features, which has been available as a beta feature for about a year now. I can't take credit for most of the form templates code, most of that was written by Rainer Grosskopf KI7RMJ, but I was able to nudge Pat's founder, Martin Pedersen LA5NTA, into creating a new release. So far, most of the feedback is very positive! There are a couple of bugs to fix and necessary UX improvements to make, but at least it's out there in the world!