Thanks to everyone who participated in our No Frill New Year Drill. It was a great opportunity to try out the new Winlink mapping option. The information gathered showed both the sitrep and local weather information on the map with real time data. Pretty cool stuff. It also points out our need to know our GPS coordinates both from home and in the field. I have written my coordinates on a sticky note at my radio station and I have a new GPS app (free) on my phone. Hopefully you can do or have done something similar.
We have news that the Multnomah County EOC that is located at the Juvenile Justice Center will be dismantled by June 1. We are hopeful that we can move the K7MCE-10 Winlink gateway to the Multnomah Building at 501 SE Hawthorne Blvd, at least until a new EOC is formalized. Years ago there was an HF and VHF/UHF amateur radio station there and the antennas are still on the roof so we are hopeful that they are still useable or fixable. We will keep you posted on this change as things develop.
It is time to dust off and tune up your mobile and portable radio equipment as this year we hope to practice much more from the field. We have committed to providing communications for the Mt. Hood 50 marathon this summer (July 9 and 10) and we will soon be recruiting MCARES members to help. Our annual GPS food drive will also be on the list of activities. Time to get out of the house!
Thanks for all the support as I assume my new role as MCARES Emergency Coordinator. Join me in welcoming Matthew AF7PV as our newest AEC (Assistant Emergency Coordinator). Matthew has been with MCARES since 2015 and is a member of the Bravo team. He will continue as the MCARES Station Chief at the PBEMECC. Thank you Matthew for joining the leadership team!
The Fall SET “Where’s Waldo” was a booming success, we had 40 members participate and our intra county field team made several voice and Winlink contacts with our neighbor counties. Our thanks to Joe, Linda, and Dave for setting up the field station at Nansen Summit. WOW! Adam reports a record 39 packet connections and 27 Vara connections at his KF7LJH Winlink gateway.
A special thanks to our two roving Waldos, Matthew and Gary, for driving around and sending in GPS coordinates. We really appreciate all of our members who participated by sending in their reports as it helps us all to keep our skills and equipment alive.
The second MCARES trailer, the “Red Beast,” will be moving to the west side of town soon. We have permission to store it at the old Jerome Sears Armory on Multnomah Boulevard. The county is in the process of replacing the stolen equipment and it is our hope to turn the trailer into comfortable operating space for west side operations.
A reminder that our November membership meeting will move to the 3rd Thursday, November 18, to avoid conflict with the Thanksgiving holiday.
We will have a field drill involving all MCARES teams on Saturday, March 7 from 09:00 to 13:00. All MCARES members are asked to participate if possible. Your team leader should be in touch with you prior to the drill, to discuss location and any other details specific to your team’s role. Please be sure to thoroughly read the drill guide and ICS-205 before the drill, and direct any questions to your team leader.
I’m so glad to be entering a new year with the state’s best radio crew. I would especially like to thank the leadership team for spending an entire Saturday in December to chart our path through the new year. As we go forward in the new year a lot of the same skills and themes from before will be returning. There are also minor tweaks to improve on the strong operating foundation we have built over the last several years.
Our main focus areas will continue to be digital field operations (Winlink from temporary locations) and building our technical and operation knowledge and skills. We have some new equipment, and a slight revision to the existing field kits. By late spring, I expect a new portable asset to be deployed (the Spartan trailer). Our exercises and drills will attempt to repeat and cement our basic skills, while allowing room for growth as well.
Later in the year we will have our campout, which I have aligned with the “Worked All Europe” DX SSB contest. I hope to include a tailgate swap meet element to the August go kit show-and-tell. Right off the bat in January there is Winter Field Day on Jan 25th and our first drill will be a pajama drill on February 1st. I hope to see everyone at the January general membership meeting for a discussion of SOP revisions and further discussion of the year ahead.
Thanks to all, and I am sincerely looking forward to it!
We will be running training exercises for MCARES on Sunday, July 21 and Saturday, August 17. I hope for maximum participation on these dates, as the plan is for full drills to maximize training value. That said, I do not expect everyone to make both dates, although it would be great to participate in both if you can.
For now, I just wanted to give everyone a heads-up for these upcoming drill dates.
The Winlink Drill from Home on February 9 indicated that we need to improve in three basic ways: understanding the drill guide, testing knowledge and equipment, and sticking to business.
The first and last step in preparation for any drill is to read the Drill Guide. This is usually emailed to the entire membership up to a week or two before the drill. Read it carefully all the way through as soon as you receive it and be sure you understand what is expected of you. If you don’t understand something, email leadership [at] multnomahares [dot] org for clarification. If we get the same question several times, we will revise the guide. Watch for a last minute revised drill guide and read it all the way through again. About an hour before the drill starts, read the drill guide all the way through again, and again, and again. Print it, highlight the tasks and instructions you will need and keep it with you throughout the drill.
As MCARES operators, we should always have our gear in top operating order and know how to use it. Drills give us an opportunity to check this. At least a day or two before the drill, check out the equipment you will be using, including the software. Are your batteries fully charged, including your laptop? Is your Winlink Express version up to date? If you don’t do this often, you may need to reinstall with the latest version. Update the channel selection too. Waiting until the last minute may lead to unexpected delays if your operating system decides it needs a major update and you need to reinstall Winlink Express. Do you remember how to send and reply to Winlink template messages? Can you connect to two or three gateways?
Are your settings and preferences correct? Everyone, please, in Winlink Express click Settings then Preferences.
All of the boxes in the “Message acknowledgement options” section should NOT be checked.
In the “Message sending options” section, the “Add //WL2K’ to the subject of messages” should NOT be checked. //WL2K is ONLY needed if you are sending a message FROM a standard (not Winlink) email address to a Winlink address AND your standard email (from) address is not in the recipient’s whitelist.
In a disaster situation and in drills, the airways and gateways are very busy. That is why we stress keeping all communications brief and to the point and we do not engage in chit-chat and social niceties. This goes for voice as well as Winlink. Do not send any messages that are not asked for in the drill guide. Do not send copies (cc) unless requested. Do not ask for or send receipt acknowledgement messages. Do not resend a message if you don’t get a response quickly. Do not send large file attachments. (One gateway crashed because of this.) All of these things steal time from the frequencies and gateways and slow the delivery of the essential message traffic.
Every drill should be treated as if it were a real disaster response. Preparing for drills keeps us ready should something happen and we are activated. Following these suggestions (did I mention to read the Drill Guide?) will keep us all on our toes and ready to serve when we are called upon.
Congratulations to MCARES for taking first place in the Statewide ARES 2018 Fall SET MacGyver task! It was a great team effort and we had 31 members help in the many roles of the relay. The grand prize was a SignaLink which we have already received. It will go to the Gresham EOC radio room.
We also completed the other elements of the SET and had many HF checkins from members at home. Robert did a fantastic job putting together a video documenting our approach to the MacGyver task. A special thanks to Adam and Carrie who were unable to attend but worked long hours on writing the drill guide to make sure we all knew what we were doing. Way to go everyone!
This was the last big exercise for the year and now we can all kick back and enjoy the holiday season. The final general membership meeting for the year will be November 29 and there will be no December meeting. The Leadership team meets on December 2 for a day-long planning session for 2019. The new training calendar will be decided as will be dates and times for special drills and events. The ARES newsletter will also resume in January.
Thanks to all our members for making 2018 one of our best. We increased our membership to 115 members and worked together to train and to become one of the best ARES units in the state!
Thanks to everyone who participated in the July 28 “Shelters in the Park’ exercise. In all we had 38 AROs operating outdoors from 11 local parks. The Mike team was net control from Westmoreland Park and the new portable UHF repeater was set up at Council Crest Park keeping us all connected. All of the teams sent Winlink messages to the County EOC and to our shelter coordinator at the ARES trailer. The County EOC team also coordinated and received SSTV images from the field. The focus of this exercise was to continue to train on the yellow digital go kits and to test the range of the portable UHF repeater from the Council Crest location.
We did learn a few things. As awesome as the elevation is at Council Crest, our Echo team was not able to make contact from Fairview City Park. They were successful from Gresham at Bella Vista Park which is located on top of a hill at 410 feet. The Delta team signal was pretty scratchy from St. Johns Park but was much improved when they moved east to Kenton Park. The Alpha, Bravo, Charlie and Mike teams were very clear into the portable repeater from all of their parks. All of this testing really helps to expand our capabilities and evaluate the best location for the repeater. We will try several different locations in the future.
There was also great feedback from the field that this was a fun and worthy team building exercise. Our newer members got a lot of hands on experience and we had suggestions on needed improvements to the drill guide.
Be sure to attend the August 23 ARES meeting to learn more about the portable repeater and the 2 small cross-band/digipeater kits. Adam KF7LJH will be showing them to you and talking about their amazing capabilities.
I would like to start out with a big thank you to everyone who participated and volunteered 140 personnel hours to the Fall Simulated Emergency Test (SET).
We successfully executed operations from three stations on Saturday, October 16. Adam KF7LJH and Deb KK7DEB led the operations from the trailer (N7MCU) at Scouter’s Mountain. Robert WX5TEX was in charge of the county station at the Donald E. Long Center (JJC). Nathan N9VCU operated from Kelly Butte. Thanks to Metro, Multnomah County, and Portland Bureau of Emergency Management/Portland Parks for providing access to these great locations for our exercise.
Thank you all for taking our safety training seriously, and to Deb and John KI7LYP for procuring the hard hats. Masts were raised at Scouter’s Mountain and Kelly Butte. The Kelly Butte mast operation was somewhat different than normal. Normally the masts we use are either the nested push-up style or aluminum style with the large tripod. At Kelly Butte we used a 40ft mast that was assembled to full length on the ground and then raised to the vertical position. We used 7 personnel to achieve this lift, and were able to do so safely. We learned a few things in the process, and I will cover those at the general membership meeting. Potentially another 1,000 feet of line and a come-along may make this a one or two person operation.
Additionally, Martians were able to make off with the arrow your fearless EC has used to loft antenna lead-lines in the past. This has led me to swear a vendetta against their entire planet. As soon as Elon Musk can provide reasonably priced accommodations, I’ll take the fight directly to them.
Voice communications on HF were extremely poor from the JJC. Kelly Butte is a very quiet operating location (low RF noise) and we were able to make some HF contacts. The bulk of Multnomah ARES’ operating successes were via Pactor. Although the HF Winlink nodes were busy, the low S/N needed for Pactor to work made a great difference at the power levels we normally run. Kelly Butte also was able to effectively pass NTS traffic through the Metro area. This included the ability to hit many VHF repeaters in neighboring counties. Word on the street is that Lynn Burrell had a grill going in Washington county, making the operators on this side of the hills salivate. Multnomah ARES normally has the grilling game on-point, so I’ll avoid letting down our field teams in the future!
Again, thanks to all the operators who made the SET such a great time. I may have had more fun than any drill in the past few years. I’ll try to hide the ICS-214 from the Kelly Butte crew from judgmental eyes, as it shows N9VCU cared way more about antennas, masts, and Pactor modems than complete paperwork, but all in all a great success!
What a busy month we have had! Thanks to all who helped Multnomah County Emergency Management by volunteering their time to help support the Eagle Creek Fire response. We had members helping at the EOC in Troutdale and in Corbett for the resident reentry check in point. In all we volunteered over 250 hours. WOW! Great job everyone!
Behind the scenes we also had a team of builders working on the four new digital go-kits. They have been working on Saturdays from the end of August to present. Their mission is almost complete and each of our ARES teams will now have their own digital kit to use in the field. YAY! Thanks to all the kit builders for their hard work and volunteer time.
As if that was not enough we also had an Alpha/Echo team drill on September 9 and a couple of outreach events including the Get Ready Gresham event on September 16.
This month goes into the history book as one of our busiest times. The support of our membership has been so awesome. We are so fortunate to have such a great team so willing to help out as needed. We appreciate every one of you.
As we all catch our breath and adjust to the season change I hope many of you will be available for the Fall SET on October 15. This is a really great opportunity to hone our radio skills.
