A couple things came out of our last in-person meeting
- Severe Weather Activation
- Connecting to our Weekly Net Meeting through your device
Severe Weather Activiation
While Chad WA4ORM gives us timely predictions of the arrival of severe weather days ahead of time, we may not know if we need Skywarn activation until the “last minute.” We are working on updating our activation plan this year but in the mean time, and during this time of the year when we observe more Severe Weather, we would like a plan to begin communications when weather strikes. It can take extra time for me to create an email or a RAVE announcement when time is short, and emails rarely interrupt what I am doing, but text messages and voice calls are good at interrupting me. I would like us all to set up two steps, which may become part of our plan going forward.
- Make sure you are signed up with the County Emergency alert system.
- For Dane County, Sign up here: https://em.countyofdane.com/emergency-alerts
- For Iowa County, Sign up here: https://www.smart911.com/smart911/ref/reg.action?pa=IowaCountyWI
- Or both. When I went to smart911 it told me that I had already signed up for Dane County and gave me the option of Iowa County
- Check as many options as you’d like but be sure to include Tornado Watch and Warning
- Once you’ve signed up you will start to receive emergency notifications from the county. On the First Wednesday of Each month you should receive a test alert, this is a reminder that you are signed up and it is working.
- When you receive an alert simply look to see if it has the word Tornado in the text.
- If it has the word Tornado in it tune your radio to the MARA “15” repeater. It may take a few moments for us all to get there but we will begin a resource Net. If Happy Hour is underway, we’ll shut down happy hour for the day. At that time we may not yet know if we are being activated for Skywarn but while we are checking in whoever is available we will be having conversations with Emergency Management Staff to see if they are activating the EOC. If so the first place you will hear will be on the Resource Net. Once we are activated we will move to the normal Skywarn frequency, 444.375, unless otherwise instructed.
For most other activations we will normally have more time to gather the troops so for those we’ll send out an email with a planned time and frequency for a resource net
Once we see how this works we may or may not update it but for now let’s see how this works for us.
Connecting to our Weekly Net Meeting through your device
From some places it is difficult to connect to the MARA 15 repeater (we hope to fix that soon). For those who have difficulty, for one reason or another, you can join us at our weekly Net Meeting through AllStar. There is an App that installs on your phone, Android or iPhone. The MARA Repeater is node #67384 and you can find instructions on the MARA website at: https://w9hsy.org/all-star-connection-instructions/
That’s All For now. I’ll publish the video from our in-person meeting soon.
I’ll see you on the radio
Jeff, K9UNZ
Dane/Iowa County EC
