Field Day June 26,27 2010 - purpose = Radio Emergency Preparedness
ERC, MARA, RACES, ARES and many LOCAL NETS all exist to further Emergency Radio Preparedness. The ultimate ham radio emergency drill is called FIELD DAY.
More info is found at www.arrl.org including a field day station locator. Some (most) field day setups include a GOTA station. GOTA = Get On The Air. a GOTA station is a radio at the Field Day site that is reserved exclusively for people with NO ham license! There is always a dedicated Control Operator next to the radio, but this is a chance for your non-ham family members and friends to talk on HF to people all over the country and even the world!
NO ONE gets bored at field day stations. Come see the excitement, enjoy the refreshments (bring some if you like), help out where you can, and leave with new memories.
ARRL FIELD DAY IS ON TWITTER
The account for ARRL’s Field Day actions with Twitter is ARRL_FD. Sign up to create your own Twitter account -- it’s free -- and follow ARRL_FD. If you already have a Twitter account, just follow us.
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets, text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers (who are known as followers). You can send these short messages by computer or even via text with your cell phone. When you receive a tweet, you can also relay it on to your own followers (called a retweet). Your followers can in turn relay it even further, getting your message spread around, growing and going.
For posts with #FIELDDAY (the # sign must be included) in with the message, Twitter will keep track of it: “If there is enough traffic with #FIELDDAY in the text, then major blogs and news take note of it. So by taking part in this experiment, tweeting and using the #FIELDDAY insert in with your message -- called a hashtag -- will help bring all of Field Day to the media’s attention. Social networking is new to a lot of us, but I found it is really not hard at all to learn and do. The more people we get on, the more tweeting we do, the better opportunity we have to expose Amateur Radio to a new audience.”
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Today I held a mini-emergency drill using my Harbor Freight 1.5 Watt Solar Charger. In direct sunlight it can produce 25 Volts with no load. Under load it produces 12 Volts at 1/8 amp for 1.5 watts. The test today was to be able to use it indoors about 6PM to charge a battery. Since my neighbor's house blocked three windows from receiving direct sunlight, I used the only window getting direct sunlight, the frosted glass window in the bathroom. I measured 22.4 volts with no load! Plenty for charging Gel Cells and other emergency batteries.
These things are not very expensive and are great to have around to keep your Gel Cells topped off without running up the electric bill. Some modifications are required to work the unit with a battery. The standard plug is a cigarette lighter plug since the unit was designed for us in cars to keep the battery topped off.
Two way to reverse that. 1) get a female cigarette lighter socket and wire it for attachment to a battery with alligator clips or other connectors. 2) there is a standard automotive "offset" connector in the middle of the cable. These can be purchased at auto parts houses and then you can make your own cable with Anderson Power poles to connect to LOTS of things.
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On Monday June 7th, the Deseret News Front Page had an article titled, "Down Economy puts food storage in focus". They mentioned two local emergency food storage places, Emergency Essentials and Survival Solutions. Both can be found with Google Maps or MapQuest.
The article got me to thinking about the food in my Ham Radio Grab & Go Kit. It is about time to replace some items in there. You have to rotate the food items in there or prepare to be grossed out when you open the kit next time.
In addition to water, three excellent items to keep in there are MRE's, Food Bars, and hard candy.
If you do not have experience with MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), ask before you buy. Eating all the wrong ones can either bind you up or give you the runs. You need the right mixture. It is a good idea to try various ones before deciding to make them a part of your Grab & Go Kit.
Food bars are great and last a really long time, but require more water than do MREs. You can buy bulk granola bars at Costco, Sam's Club, and Wal-Mart.
Hard candy will keep your mouth moist and quell your appetite. In a true emergency situation lasting several hours, you will do a LOT of talking as a radio operator and will need some way to conserve your water supply while keeping your mouth moist. Hard candy works great for this.
If you can get the individually wrapped candies, so much the better. People used to recommend Life Savers. Experience has shown that time and/or heat will turn your package of Life Savers into just ONE long piece of candy that is mostly just a sugar lump. Individually wrapped hard candies are exempt from this phenomenon.
A great suggestion from Allan, W7WSQ, try to use standardized message forms and train your operators to give only the data, not the labels. For example, a neighborhood post-earthquake inventory form might start like this.
STREET = 2200 block of Downington Ave
Houses = 24
Deaths = 3
Injuries = 21
Resources =
Fires =
Broken water mains =
etc.
When reporting in, you do not read off the labels (Street, Houses, etc.) just the data. "2200 block of Downington Ave, 24, 3, 21 skip (or 0), none" and so on.
This makes collecting the data easier and faster, gets to the next report sooner, and makes totaling the data for upstream reporting much easier. It also helps to cut down on unnecessary chatter by overly "wordy" operators. Remember the TV commercial that describes a lady who could take an hour to tell a five minute story? We don't need long wordy descriptions when succinct facts from a standard form will do just fine.
We will have a special training subject on the second Tuesday in September on the ERC Stake Net on 145.45 at 9PM. Hope to see all of you there.
73 de N7OZH - O. D. Williams - Salt Lake City, Utah.
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