There will be NO in-person meeting on the last day of the month this month, May 2025, however the normal ARES/RACES Net Meeting will be held at 8PM on the 28th as it is every week on the MARA “15” repeater.
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September 2024 Monthly Meeting
Well, after a weekend back in the stone age my internet service is back today!
We are meeting in person this week on Wednesday, 9/25 @ 7PM at the Dane County EOC at 2982 Kapec Rd, Fitchburg, WI 53719
In various ways over the last few months I’ve been answering questions about “Getting Started.” I realize I need to update that information on our website for new and old alike. I’d like to start that update at this week’s meeting. There are some new things to take note of and some reminders of things that have been out there for a while.
For those unable to join us in person you can use the Google Meet virtual space. (Google Meet information went out in an email to Hams in the area, If you did not receive the email please send a request with your Call Sign to KB9ORN@gmail.com
Please also note that due to scheduling conflicts and holidays this will be our last in-person meeting for 2024. However the Net meetings at 8PM every Wednesday will continue as usual.
No In-Person Meeting on August 28, 2024
We are all on Summer Break. We won’t be meeting in person on August 28, 2024. We will hold the Net Meeting at our usual time.
Storm Spotter Classes Scheduled for Spring 2024
The ARES Standardized Training Plan AKA The ARES Task Book, suggests that all ARES operators should have Storm Spotter Training at least every other year. To support the National Weather Service has scheduled 4 Storm Spotter training in our area (Dane and Iowa Counties) this spring.
The classes are scheduled as follows:
- March 21, 1:30PM, Iowa County Sheriff’s Department Conference Room
- March 21, 6:30PM, Iowa County Sheriff’s Department Conference Room
- April 2, 1:00PM, Mount Horeb Public Library
- April 2, 6:30PM, FItchburg, Dane County EOC
For more information on attending and on how to register for virtual attendance if needed please go to the NWS web site here: https://www.weather.gov/mkx/spotter-schedule . Please note you may have to register, click on the event in the calendar on the page for any additional information.
October 2023 Monthly Meeting
It’s the last Thursday of the month and time to get together. We’ll be meeting at 7:00 pm on Thursday, October 26, at UW Space Place at Villager Shopping Center, 2300 S Park St # 100, Madison, WI 53713. Come in the main door, straight ahead, down the stairs, into the hallway and Space Place is on the left.
We will be discussing how we might respond to an emergency incident using a tabletop exercise. I’m looking forward to getting us around the table and hearing your creativity. If you can’t make it in person, check your email for a link we sent out. Otherwise send an email to kc9unz@arrl.net including your call sign and we’ll send you the Zoom connection information.
Simulated Emergency Resource Net – Oct 7, 2023
Rather than let the SET weekend pass without any acknowledgement we decided to have a Simulated Emergency Resource net. We asked any operators who were able to check in using our normal net repeater and give us a call sign, location and whether they were using a battery or commercial power and if they were using a fixed or mobile station. We had 14 check-ins. We had a scheduling conflict with a home Badgers game so some of our regulars would not be able to check-in. You gotta have priorities!
Just for fun(?) I decided to map the check-in and you can view the map here.
Thanks to all who were able to participate.
September 2023 Monthly Meeting
We will hold our monthly meeting this month on September 28 at 7:00 PM, however, we will not meet in person. We’ll be using Google meet this month, you can either click on the link and join or call the number. We’ll talk briefly about the upcoming SET, review how all the Public Service Events went this year and brain storm what we’d like to do next year. I’ll not publish the link here so we can avoid bombing. Please check your email tomorrow. If you do not receive an email drop a note to kc9unz@arrl.net and let me know and I’ll send you a copy.
Staffing Emergency Services
While on a tour this past week I had the opportunity to sit with a retired public health director. He drew the lucky wild card and retired just before we even knew there would be a pandemic. In his closing interview he noted specifically that he would recommend budget to plan and provide for a pandemic and mass vaccinations among other things. Prophetic.
It got me to thinking about how do you plan, budget, staff for unanticipated emergencies. Certainly you can’t hire hundreds of staff people for something that may never happen. No one has the budget for that and it would be a ridiculous waste of money.
Our conversation helped me to better understand our role as Amateur Radio Emergency Service (#ARES) volunteers and my role as Emergency Coordinator for Dane and Iowa Counties here in Wisconsin.
Staffing for emergencies seems to be all about relationships. You don’t have to “own” every resource you need but you need to foster relationships so if/when you need a particular skill set you know how to contact them and have a good idea of what kind of expertise they can bring to bear when needed.
As a group of #HamRadio enthusiasts we
- play with our gear
- we learn how to overcome problems
- practice our craft
- provide communications for public events
- maintain amateur radio equipment at various public locations like hospitals, and county and state emergency operations centers and
- attend a menu of training classes so we are knowledgeable about FEMA’s National Incident Management System
and that is just off the top of my head. And we do all this mostly for free, at least not for money.
We have radio frequencies allocated for our exclusive use across the radio spectrum enabling us to communicate across town across the continent and around the globe. We can communicate with the space station as well! It is true that during normal times those frequencies are exclusively for amateur use but there have been times (during WWII) when “our” frequencies were set aside for Federal use and we were not allowed to use them but that almost never happens and the frequencies were returned to #AmateurRadio use as soon as the war was over.
What the community gets for this group of folk out in back yards, parks, downtown and out in the hinterland “playing radio” is a stable of folk who at the drop of a hat can provide coordinated communications off-the-grid, with or without commercial power in virtually any conditions, either as primary incident communications or a secondary channel for additional communications.
It also gets a group of curious experimenters who have historically pushed the edges of how we can use radio waves for communications. We have figured out how to send email (#winlink), files, images, phone calls over radio. If needed we can set up computer networking and webcams. Even as I write this I am following the location of support vehicles for a Bike event using Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS), a radio based messaging system that we use for mobile stations to automatically report where they are on the course so we can intelligently deploy support where needed.
This is me, thinking out loud and trying to understand better why we do what we do and how we can do it better.
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.
July 2023 In-Person Meeting Cancelled
A whole bunch of you are enjoying your summer vacays and can’t come to the July meeting anyway…so, don’t! Take the last Thursday of the month (July 27) off this month, we won’t be meeting, However….
Aug and Sept Are On!
- August 31 – We will gather in a park and talk about and demo setting up outside. What should you bring? What should you think about? If you have solutions or questions come on down. I’ll send out a notification about Place and Time next Month
- September 28 – Luke, KC9IFF is going to talk to us about cross-banding. What is it? Why do it? How do I do it? I saw a cross-banding presentation back in 2012, time for a reminder. We’ll be meeting at UW Space Place for that one. I’ll send out more information in September.