ARES Event: Arapahoe County Fair

-

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!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New station setup and grounding problems

-
Image
A couple of weeks back I rearranged my home office and shack. The new arrangement gets my HF station off of my desk and onto its own shelf, and it's been sitting there receiving FT8 quite happily while I've been programming and testing a WSJT-X UDP receiver  for Golang. However, today was my first attempt at operating FT8, and unfortunately, something about the current arrangement is causing my CI-V control to reset every time I transmit. Having CAT control reset on transmit is a killer problem for digital modes. With WSJT-X in particular, the software ends the transmission if CAT resets, so you've lost that entire transmit cycle. I had similar problems in the old desk location with certain bands; for example, I couldn't really operate anything below 40 meters due to CI-V resets, and even on 40m I had to limit my power to keep it reliable. Today's test on 20m was very discouraging. I used to be able to run 20m at 100W if I felt the need (usually used less), but to...
Read more

Researching HF

-
Image
I haven't been on the air much lately because I've been doing more research than operations. I've been looking into a mobile radio to supplement my HTs and give me a little more power and reach, and I'm very attracted to a multi-band radio that includes HF. That's taken me down an incredible rabbit hole of what all is possible outside of VHF/UHF. Transceiver The sheer amount of gear needed to get into HF is a little staggering. The transceivers themselves are, of course, pricey. Then one needs mobile antennas suited for the desired bands; mobile options range from basic "hamsticks," a set of whip antennas which need to be swapped out when switching bands, all the way up to a motorized "screwdriver" antenna with its own hydraulic lift. After that, you might need an antenna tuner (I've heard conflicting opinions about this), and at least an SWR meter if not a full antenna analyser to tell whether a tuner is needed. At least in a mobile set...
Read more

First Mobile Radio: Kenwood TM-D710G

-
Image
I've been looking at mobile radios for a while, but the difficult thing about it is that there's no radio that does everything. I've been looking at: VHF/UHF radios that support digital voice modes like DMR, or  VHF/UHF radios that include a TNC and APRS, or  all-band radios that do HF in addition to VHF/UHF, or  HF-only rigs.  Choosing one means giving up on the other modes, or running multiple radios which multiplies cost and complexity. After much humming and hawing, I decided that packet is one of the things I'd most like to master (even though the prevalence of packet is supposedly much reduced from its heyday), so I chose what seems to be the most popular dual-bander with a TNC. The Kenwood TM-D710G puts out 50W on the 2m and 70cm bands, which is an order of magnitude more power than the HTs I've been using. It has a well-integrated TNC which supports APRS (with built-in GPS for location), and also more general packet/AX.25 communications, even...
Read more