Good traffic handling skills are key to our role as emergency communicators. For this month’s training we will have a brief review of traffic handling techniques, and then we’ll break into small groups to practice sending, copying, and logging ICS 213 and NTS Radiogram messages. Multnomah County ARES members and Portland NET radio operators are highly encouraged to attend this training.
Please join us for our May general membership meeting on Thursday, May 25 at the Portland Fire and Rescue training center at 4800 NE 122nd Ave in Portland. There will be a Q&A session and informal gathering for new members from 18:15 to 19:00. The main meeting will run from 19:00 to 21:00. Everyone is welcome!
Additional information about our monthly meetings can be found on the meeting page.
Join us in welcoming our newest members, Jim KA7AGH and Lee KF7YUO. Jim will join the Echo team and Lee the Alpha team. This brings our total membership to 76 active members.
Have technical questions? Call or email your team leaders! If they can’t help you, they will refer you to someone who can.
Want to get your General ticket? Hoodview Amateur Radio Club is offering General Class ham classes on May 6 and 13 with testing on the 20th. Contact Cory at ka7iug [at] frontier [dot] com or Jim at 503-702-2760.
It appears that we have a record turnout for the Walk MS event on April 15. Thanks to all of you who have volunteered to support our communications efforts. It also looks like ABJ Drones, who were at our February meeting, want to join in with a demonstration of video back to the Comms trailer. Pretty exciting stuff!
It is never a good thing when we have two events on back to back weekends but we hope you will also help out with the State Spring SET the following weekend on April 22. The exercise will focus on shelter locations throughout the County. We have 10 sites on our radar and really need a good turnout to get the job done. Adam has challenged us to “Beat Washington County” by having the most locations staffed in the whole state. This Spring SET is special to us because it was written by Multnomah County ARES leadership at the request of the Oregon Section Emergency Coordinator, and we are proud of the result. Contact your team leader if you can participate.
The March 23 ARES meeting will feature guest speaker Alice Busch, Operations Division Chief for Multnomah County Emergency Management. We are very fortunate to have a really great working relationship with the county emergency management team. A special thanks to Chris Voss and Alice Busch for funding our website fees for the next three years!
The Bravo and Echo team drill was March 11 and all who participated agreed it was a great success and learning experience. We will take a break from team drilling for April as we focus on Walk MS and the State SET. May will bring together the Delta and Charlie teams for their first exercise together.
The Echo/Bravo Team Drill on Saturday, March 11 went very well. The Bravo Team operated with three team members and Matthew, team leader, at the PBEM ECC and a three member field team simulating a shelter. Special thanks to Joe WA7FWC from the Charlie Team for heading up the field team and teaching the three Bravo team members how to operate the digital go kit.
The Echo Team had two members plus myself at the Gresham EOC and two members at Gresham Fire Station 74. This was the first time we have operated Winlink from a fire station. Joel N7LF ran net control from the trailer. All three Echo locations had some equipment difficulties but we managed to solve or work around the issues and got the job done as planned.
I was very pleased to see how well everyone did with message and station logs! Nice job! I will point out that each station should only log the messages they send or receive at that station, not every message handled in the entire drill.
The members of the monthly Digital Modes Net have begun experimenting with Fldigi. This “Fast Light Digital” application runs on several different OS platforms and uses your sound card (e.g. a SignaLink) to send digital information over the air. No TNC is required for this mode.
The Fldigi application provides a chat interface in which text is sent as you type it, but there are additional applications that allow more sophisticated data transfers. Flmsg is one such program; it works in cooperation with Fldigi to send form data, and there is a built-in template for the ICS-213 message form as well as the ARRL radiogram. Flmsg applies a checksum to the form data to detect transmission errors. Similarly, the Flwrap application cooperates with Fldigi to send arbitrary file data, also with a checksum.
There is an overlap in functionality between Flmsg and Winlink, but one interesting difference is that whereas Winlink is more or less for communication between two stations, Flmsg can be used to send a message to multiple stations simultaneously. That’s also true for Flwrap — it might be used to send file data from the EOC to all field stations in a single transmission, for instance. The data rate is rather slow, so this might be done simplex rather than via a repeater.
Join the Digital Modes net on the first Tuesday of the month if you’d like to give it a try. Time and frequency details are on the nets page.
Tagged as:
digital modes,
fldigi
Our next general membership meeting will be on Thursday, March 23 at the Portland Fire and Rescue training center at 4800 NE 122nd Ave in Portland. There will be a Q&A session and informal gathering for new members from 18:15 to 19:00.
The main meeting will run from 19:00 to 21:00 and will start with general business and announcements from the Leadership team. We will then have a presentation from a guest speaker: Alice Busch, Division Chief of Operations for the Multnomah County Office of Emergency Management.
Anyone who is interested in emergency communications is encouraged to join us! Additional information about our monthly meetings can be found on the meeting page.
Welcome to our newest member, Mark KC7DTE. Mark will join the Delta Team.
Due to weather and other issues, the ARRO Basics workshop that was scheduled for February 11 had to be canceled. It will happen on February 25. The ARRO Traffic Handling and Logging workshop will be on March 18. Both workshops are from 9:30 AM to 12:00 PM at the Portland Fire & Rescue Training Center where our monthly general meetings are held. To attend these workshops you must have a membership form on file and have submitted completion certificates for the online FEMA classes IS-100, IS-200, and IS-700. Preregistration is also required to ensure there are enough trainers present to get everyone through by noon. To register, contact me at eliza [dot] pride [at] gmail [dot] com.
It is nearly time once again for the annual Walk MS event in Portland. Multnomah County ARES is honored to have been asked by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society to provide communications support for their event again this year. In years past this event has been well regarded as a training and public service event for the Amateur Radio community.
The event takes place on Saturday, April 15 from approximately 08:00 to 14:00, and is held in downtown Portland along the Esplanade and in the World Trade Center Plaza.
To learn more, or to sign up to help, please visit the Walk MS Portland Communications Volunteer Registration Form.
UPDATE: Due to amazing volunteer turnout, we have been able to staff all event communications positions much earlier than expected. We have therefore decided to close volunteer registration early, on March 8. This will allow the event communications team more time to finalize position assignments and other details before the event.
