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May Hurricane Drill
My club had our Hurricane Drill today (May 1st). I had a great time. My club is incorporated into our county’s Emergency Operations Plan as communications support. We have installed ham stations in many of the fire departments across the county, with more scheduled. This allows the fire departments to communicate via UHF and VHF simplex when the county communications go down.
As a county asset, we have created a ham training class for the fire departments to train one fireman at each station to get his ham license so if one of our eComs members is not able to make it to a FD in the hurricane, each station will at least have one licensed ham on site.
I was able to communicate with five of the six fire departments in the county that we have installed ham stations at, and the sixth was a ham station in Atlantic where the install isn’t complete and the guy there was in his vehicle on a mobile, so that was expected.
EOC has issued each FD a simplex Freq and each FD can communicate simplex with the EOC and with each other.
My assigned station is Newport Fire Department. My radio is a Yaesu FT-7900 (50 watts) powered by a 12-volt deep cycle battery. The radio battery is maintained by a 100-watt solar panel. Antenna is a copper J-pole on a 16-foot mast that mounts into my truck’s hitch receiver. AC power is provided by an 800-watt inverter connected to two deep cycle batteries maintained by a second solar panel. Text messages to other stations are done via APRS and eComs personnel are plotted on the map via ARPS here
https://aprs.fi/?call=kt4v-9,kn4yck-4,kd3y,k4grw,k4grw-4&timerange=86400
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