Our January 25 General Meeting had a record attendance of 74 people! What a great way to start the
New Year.
The Winlink training was well received and prepared us for the Saturday Drill from Home on January 27. We were burning up the air waves with Winlink traffic all around the county. We were very interested to see how the Winlink email forwarding would work from the ARES trailer. The messages sent to Nathan through the N7MCU gateway were held and then forwarded via Pactor to HF gateways in Nevada and Utah. This demonstrates our ability to get the messages out if no local Internet is available. Thanks to everyone who participated and a special thanks to our team leaders and shelter leaders who had their hands full replying to all the traffic. In all we had 45 members working from home and in the
field.
The next weekend, Saturday, February 3, was the copper J-pole build held by our training manager, John KI7LYP. In all, 14 people went home with a new antenna all tuned and ready to go. There was much excitement as everyone learned to cut and solder simple copper pipe into a nifty new antenna ready to boost their radio signal. We hope to hear these new antennas in our next simplex test. If you missed out on the February build session, John is keeping a list of interested folks for another weekend workshop. You can contact him at training [at] multnomahares [dot] org.
Finally we have received all the materials for the repeater kits and the build process has started. There will be one full-on portable UHF repeater and two portable VHF/UHF kits that can either cross-band repeat or be digipeaters. These kits have robust power options with big 105 amp-hour batteries, solar charging, and propane converted Honda inverter generators. The antenna and mast systems are also robust with Diamond X50 antennas and tripod masts that can reach over 30 feet in height. Testing with these kits should start this Spring.