Welcome to our newest members Eric KG7GCQ and Matthew K7MWS.
Thank you to all who have filled out the Member Survey and John K7TY for putting it together. New this year all who fill it out can view all the replies. There is still time to reply if you have not had a chance yet. This information will help the leadership team plan for the future and prepare the 2016 training schedule.
It has been a very busy summer – lots of opportunities to practice your skills. Every event is a training event. MCARES members participated in the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade, Field Day, Oregon International Airshow, MCARES HF Radio Campout, Race for the Cure, Portland Marathon, Quake Ex II, and we will wind it all up with the Disaster Relief Trials (DRT) this Saturday. Whew! Did any of our members work the Providence Bridge Pedal? If so, or if you worked any other communications event, please let me know at eliza [dot] pride [at] gmail [dot] com
I hope you all also had some fun away from the radios this summer.
In preparation for the fall and winter stormy season, our October 22 meeting will feature SKYWARN Weather Spotter training. See you there!
We are all very excited about the progress on the trailer project. The air conditioning unit has been purchased and installed in the ceiling. Interior cabinet building is under way, thanks to Will KG7LPW and his crew. The desk and bench are completed and the electrical and IT cabinets will be started next week. We expect the equipment grant to be funded in the next thirty days. Woohoo!
It was decided at the leadership meeting that we will minimize our participation in the statewide exercise on Octtober 10. We will only activate and staff the County ECC for this exercise. The team will handle the Winlink traffic from the State ARES/OEM. The ECC team will be contacted by team leader Deb to staff this.
The exercise activities requested by the state ARES leadership involve field deployment, which we have done already fairly extensively this year. We feel it is too much to ask of you to devote three weekends in a row to ARES. It is more important and more valuable to your training and to the community that we put our effort into providing communications for the Portland Marathon the week before the exercise and the Disaster Relief Trials the week after.
The Portland Amateur Radio Club coordinates communications for the Marathon and Multnomah ARES coordinates communications for the Disaster Relief Trials. This is where we need to concentrate our efforts and our volunteer hours in October. Both of these events are fun to work and provide very different communications and radio experiences. We will be using interesting technologies for the DRT with APRS, EasyPal (Photos), HSMM (high-speed data), and field VHF Winlink.
Please sign up for one or both of these public service events. We need your help!
Welcome to our newest members, Jeff N7TTQ, Ron KE7WJI, James KG7ULF, and Sue KG7FYB. We are very excited about our membership growth. Steve W7SRH, our PIO, has been busy getting the word out to the community about MCARES, and will be at the amateur radio public relations table at the Race for the Cure this Sunday.
The Drill from Home on September 12 went very well. Several participants have said it was a valuable experience and should be repeated. There’s a good chance we’ll be doing it again next year. Everyone did very well formatting and sending their NTS messages, going off frequency to exchange messages and dealing with the scratchy signals encountered on simplex. Thank you to all who participated and a special thanks to the simplex frequency monitors who gave valuable feedback and suggestions to the message handlers and to net control (me).
We will be doing a year-end member survey again this year. It will be shorter than last year, just asking for any contact info changes and finding out what we did right and where we can improve. Watch for it probably in November and please take the time to fill it out.
The 2015 Portland Disaster Relief Trials event on October 17 was a stunning success, and the DRT event organizers were very pleased with the services provided by Multnomah County ARES! We had a lot of technical challenges in front of us this year, with the inclusion of not one, not two, but THREE digital modes we’ve never used before in an event, and I’m very happy to report that they all worked extremely well!
Winlink proved to be an efficient means of transmitting rider reports, and supplied the leaderboard volunteers with a constant stream of accurate rider information, while allowing the voice net to concentrate more on tactical traffic.
EasyPal worked flawlessly, providing the PBEM communications trailer with nearly two dozen high quality still images from the checkpoints. It was very exciting to be able to see, in near real-time, photos of the action out in the field. A special thank you goes out to Adam KF7LJH and Nate N9VCU for making that all happen.
The Broadband-Hamnet wireless mesh network link between checkpoint 4.1 (Water Feature) and the PBEM communications trailer worked amazingly well, and allowed us to display a real-time video feed from the checkpoint. Many thanks to Michael AE7XP for supplying the hardware and making it all work.
The event was a huge success not just because we were able to provide the rider reports needed by the DRT staff, but also because we gained valuable experience with digital modes that are new to many of us, and demonstrated their value and potential use in disaster response. Thanks to all the volunteers who made this possible. I hope you will consider volunteering for the DRT Communications Team again next year!
Brian Cochrane – KE7QPV
DRT Communications Organizer
I have been exposed to ham radio since I was a child, but having only gotten my ticket a year and a half ago, I have a lot to learn and my perspective on using radios in emergency situations is still fairly fresh. As I have been learning, I have come across quite a few good articles about hams coming to the aid of others in times of trouble. Here in the Northwest, we only have to look as far as the March 2014 Oso mudslide in Washington, where hams played a crucial part in making sure that the communications network was solid and that information got where it needed to go. Of course the tragic loss of ARES/RACES members Jerry Martin W6TQF and Reid Blackburn KA7AMF (among many others) during the eruptions of Mount Saint Helens back in the spring of 1980 underscores the potential danger hams may face as well as the selflessness that is displayed by many who give their time and expertise to helping others stay connected.
Since I joined ARES a little more than a year ago, I have had some pretty interesting conversations with friends about what we do and why something as seemingly arcane as ham radio would be so important. I have heard plenty of people claim that cell phone and Internet technology makes radios more or less obsolete, especially when you consider how much data is available online. I will readily admit that the availability of early warning apps and incident emergency management software is a great achievement, but when the networks go down, radios are still your best bet.
It’s not just the radios though. It takes well-trained operators to make a system work. As ARES members, the mission is to get the message through by whatever means possible and whatever medium is employed. It is really the operators who make this such a critically important system. When we volunteer at public events, we are practicing the protocol and discipline that keeps the airwaves (and ultimately the mission) organized, clears out the confusion and perpetuates habits that may save lives when an emergency arrives.
Of course, ARES does not operate in a vacuum. No matter where or under what circumstances we deploy, we find ourselves assisting and integrating with many other organizations. In my case, besides being a member of ARES, I am the ARO (amateur radio operator) for the Beaumont-Wilshire, Alameda NET (Neighborhood Emergency Team). If you are not familiar with this group, the NET program consists of around 2000 currently active volunteers throughout the City of Portland and operates under the auspices of the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM). Our main mission is to provide immediate assistance in our neighborhoods in the event of an emergency. We are trained to do search and rescue, first aid and to set up communications as well as prepare for the arrival of professional responders. We also deploy to assist for community events and to help operate warming and cooling shelters during extreme weather events.
As most of my team members are not hams, we depend on FRS radios as our means of radio communications for drills and deployments. For the past year, I have been running a net, prior to our monthly meetings in order to help train members on using their radios and to get them used to talking over the air. While participation has been fairly active, it is still only a 15 minute net, once a month so I have been seeking out ways to help the team learn some of the important aspects of radio use. Last year, Jeremy Van Keuren from PBEM was kind enough to send out a note from me to team leaders and AROs throughout the city, asking some questions about training and how they are overcoming issues relating to poor reception and such.
The response was encouraging and enlightening. Many teams have taken time to map their areas and determine where the weak links are, and quite a few have instituted strong communication training components into their preparedness regime. I took this information and wrote up a guide for radio use to distribute among my team. It was a great exercise for me and definitely helped my team move forward, but it also opened up some good connections between me and the ARES people who are actively training NETs in radio use (Michael AE7XP, Helen KE7SCS, and John K7TY). I have collected the various guides and trainings out there and attended an excellent training given to the Irvington NET by John K7TY.
This all points to one core point. If you are going to get good at something and commit it to that crucial “muscle memory” that we depend on in stressful times, you need good training and lots of practice. This ties in to our recent training in ICS 213 and NTS radio traffic handling. While I learned the use of both well enough to gain my ARRO certification last year, I find that spending time listening in and copying traffic on the NW Traffic and Training Net (6:05 PM every evening on the WORC repeater system) helps me to keep my skills honed. Learning how to use our radios to communicate has definitely helped our NET develop as a team and we have dedicated more time to actually getting people on air, practicing calling in and learning how to get the message across clearly and concisely. As our team is spread out quite a bit, we are also planning on taking some time to map out how our locations affect our ability to communicate. This is a work in progress and we will be on the lookout for ways to keep honing our skills so we will be ready and able to respond when the need arises.
Welcome to our newest member, Neil N6DVI and welcome back to Bob N6ZKL.
It’s been a very busy summer with lots of public service events and there is no slow down for September and October. Thanks to everybody who is out there volunteering for these events. There are a lot more opportunities to volunteer coming up. These events are the best way to gain experience and hone your communication and radio skills.
Communications for the Disaster Relief Trials on October 17 are coordinated by MCARES. Brian KE7QPV will start recruiting volunteers soon.
Our training at the general meeting this month will be Traffic Handling. We will split into basic and advanced groups with Michael AE7XP presenting the basics to include similarities and differences between NTS Radiograms and ICS 213s. He will cover sending and receiving protocols and how to format a simple NTS radiogram. I will present the advanced portion and cover more of the complexities of NTS traffic, book traffic, ARL numbered radiograms and how to deal with a complex emergency management form when the receiving station doesn’t have the blank form.
Our Drill from Home on September 12 will be based on this training. Participants will create an NTS radiogram message, then check into the command net. Net control will pair up AROs and send them to a simplex frequency to exchange their messages. The simplex frequencies will be monitored by an experienced traffic handler who can offer guidance and correction. AROs will report back to the command net when they have sent and received a message and then they will be dismissed.
I will be presenting another ARO Basics workshop on September 3 and a Traffic Handling workshop on September 17. These workshops are for new/provisional members to get them on their way to ARRO certification. They cover all the items on the ARRO task list. If anyone else needs a refresher, let me know and I will get you in if there is room.