Author Archives: Emergency Coordinator

AuxFOG, NIFOG, WIFOG

What?

Nearly every level of Public Service at which we could be deployed has a FOG or Field Operations Guide. Even if you are not in the middle of an incident they have a wealth of information on operating and equipment and procedures. It is Free so its worth every penny.

On Android or IPhone go to your app store and search for “Public Safety Library” (at least that is what it is called on my Android).

Once it is installed the three FOGs you will want to install first will be

  • Wisconsin Interoperable Communications Field Operations Guide (WIFOG)
  • National Interoperability Field Operations Guide (NIFOG)
  • Auxiliary Communications Field Operations Guide (AuxFOG)

Once you have them installed go ahead and browse. You’ll find some interesting stuff in there. And let us know what you think.

We Are Now Federated Using ActivityPub

What?!

There is a growing number of social media platforms that are using a protocol called ActivityPub to allow users on disconnected social networks to follow one another. You may have heard of Mastodon, an open source web service that supports ActivityPub. Others include Pixelfed, PeerTube, and Lemmy and many others. The key is that using Federated platforms you can follow and communicate with people on different systems. What would email be like if you had to have a yahoo account to send email to a yahoo user and you couldn’t email a gmail user. ActivityPub solves this problem for social media. This protocol is growing rapidly. Soon it is expected that the new social media site “Threads” by Meta will also be federated allowing users to follow accounts outside of the Meta ecosystem.

All this is to say that the Dane/Iowa County ARES/RACES site is now federated as well. If you have a social media account that allows you to follow federated accounts you can add @KB9ORN@kb9orn.org or https://kb9orn.org/author/kb9orn/ to those that you follow and every new post that we create on this site (including this one) will show up in your feed.