N5NTG | 
08 29th, 2009| 
On Saturday, August 29th, there were a few of us who got up when the chickens did, to get our radios and portable antennas ready for a South Texas Hurricane Drill. Some operators chose locations that were pre-set up and air conditioned, others like me chose to “rough it” in the great outdoors without any AC. Fortunately for us, the weather cooperated and it didn’t storm on us, nor did it get as hot as recent days. My van’s thermometer (sitting out there in the sun on black asphalt) got up to 102, but it wasn’t that hot inside our very shaded shelter area. We should have brought a box fan with us, but we didn’t think about that until we were already there and set up.
Hill Country REACT Team was tasked with staffing the state rest area located on west bound IH-10 at the 619 mile marker. To convert that description into plain English, this was the last major rest stop on IH-10 for folks coming west from Houston or the coast, prior to Seguin or even San Antonio, TX. This rest stop has been used in previous (actual) evacuations to monitor traffic flow on the interstate, so that emergency officials (primarly in San Antonio) could be given advance notice of mass arrivals. We only truly needed to run 2 meters VHF capability here, but we experimented with a couple of HF antennas as well.
Today, three members (Lee N5NTG, Gary K5GST, Ray KE5KHN) of our REACT Team set up as part of a much larger drill, a drill that saw at least 2 ARES groups, our REACT Team, the Bexar Operators Group, South TX Navy-Marine Corps MARS, an Army MARS station, 2 National Weather Service Offices, multiple county EOC’s both near SA and down by the coast, etc.
