Thread: Ares/races
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Old 08-18-2014, 10:41 PM   #16
Mr. Ham
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Join Date: Aug 2014
Posts: 95
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In my area, the amateur radio club divided into two separate clubs.
The Quad County retards and rejects are on one side and the ARES / RACES group is on the other side of the county.
Rockton Mountain might as well be the Himalaya Mountains because neither group wants anything to do with the other.

The Quad County people are nothing but a bunch of CB'rs, their leader even has CB in his call sign. They are a mix of old geisers and wanna bee's and younger hams that never operated other then on the two meters repeaters or a HF net.

The ARES / RACES group is a bunch of CB'rs that has the support of the local ARRL representative. They don't actually do anything, they only started their own club to try to wrestle the control of the local repeater away from other other club.
When they were unsuccessful, they quit having meetings and doing things..

The local county EC does not live in the county, he is employed as a state police dispatcher, and was the 911 dispatcher when he was appointed to his position.. I don't know how legal it is for someone to operate dual mode when they have a pecuniary interest. Being paid by the state and being a volunteer for amateur radio. And, when he has to go to work, his shift would end and someone else would have to pick it up or shut down the station.. No one has access here to the local EOC...

The local club down in town is down to its last 6 members, and the President said he is tired of carrying the coffee pot to the meetings and having to stop and buy the doughnuts. They get a President and then they work them to death until they quit and then they elect someone else from the buddy club.

The biggest problem with the club is that the older members also belongs to the QC club and they don't operate. They don't teach the newer members how to operate and the club does not have a working HF radio or their own repeater.

The hills are so steep and the valleys so deep that you cannot talk simplex from the emergency shelters back to the EOC with a handheld radio - which is all that some of the group has.

There is a 50 mile marathon race this weekend and out of 3 clubs they managed to get 2 volunteers to run the check points, they still need 12 more people to have a full boat and 6 people if they could get them to work two check points each..
This is sad when you consider the one volunteer is the county EC and the other would be the assistant EC.

I have completed most of my FEMA training and I sent a copy of each certificate to my EC, and got no reply..
I relayed the information from their last SET - Situational Emergency Test back to the State EOC and Regional Director and didn't even get a thank you.
I also cooperated with the other local group in the next county - Indiana when they did their SET, and got a much better response.

At least the Indiana group has been trying to do NBEMS on their local repeater on Monday nights..
The only problem is that they need to be doing this on the HF and on simplex modes.. You have to believe that the repeater is not going to work when there is an emergency..
Their repeater barely works when the sky is blue and the weather is calm.
The 910 repeater looks directly at the middle of the tallest smoke stack at the Homer City Power plant, the third tallest smoke stack in North America...

The only problem is that its antenna only has a western and southern exposure, it doesn't talk North or South very well - too many mountains.

What is a man to do? Well we do a series of digital nets on 80 and 40 meters on Sunday Mornings. KB3FXI - Dave runs the net when he is home and others picks it up when he is not.

Me being the only digital operator in the 8 county area { Jefferson, Blair, Clearfield, Elk, Center, Forrest, Clarion and Armstrong ) is an asset to any group. I can pretty much hear anything that goes on for 40 miles in all directions simplex and 65 miles on the repeaters..

With 4 radios, each with their own separate antenna's in the shack, I can send and listen at the same time to 2 meters, 70 cm, all of HF and everything that the programmable scanner can receive from 120 Mhz to 900 MHz... The scanner is on a commercial discone antenna that has been tuned to 2 meters / 70 cm with less than 1.6:1 on 2 meters and almost flat 1:1 on 70 cm, so it can also be used in a pinch as a transmit antenna if I need it, it is fed with very low loss coax.

A GOTA box sits in the shack, coils of coax in the shed, dozens of antenna's in the box and rafters, several power supplies, a battery bank, a 5000 watt Honda generator, 40' of Rohn 25G tower on the trailer W / a tilt plate.
I can deploy in about 3 hours to any location.

Fat chance they would ever call me!
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