San Antonio Hams

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.

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A blast from the 70’s, when “Radio” in “Radio Shack” still meant something…

Compared with today….

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In a recent posting by W2IK, the upcoming drill on Saturday, August 29th, was discussed in rather general terms.   Since that time, we’ve increased the scope of this event somewhat.    We’ve added one ARES group (Hayes / Caldwell County) to the mix, and have room for more if other groups want to  participate.

The event will only last 3 hours of radio time (11am – 2pm Saturday), compressing several days into 3 hours.  What fun!   We’ll be using local VHF freqs for operations near SA and another freq for local CC comm, plus a 40 meters net for the group, and MARS’s HF freq for their internal operations.  We’ll be using the NWS office in New Braunfels KD5UMW and Drisocoll Childrens Hospital W5DCH as net controls.

Event:  Hurricane “Albert” is expected to make landfall just north of Corpus with maximum winds at 130 mph.

• Hour 1 – Pre-Landfall – evacuation of residents in coastal cities in path of storm. Problems with evac routes and major side routes.  Status of Shelter fill rates, etc.
• Hour 2 – Landfall – Loss of power, high winds, property damage noticed, major flooding and high surf conditions.  Problems with evac routes and major side routes.  Status of Shelter fill rates, etc.
• Hour 3 – Post-Landfall – Sending in teams to evaluate damage, return residents, status of evac routes being returned to normal use, power failures in area, comm failures in area due to towers blown or power failures, etc.  Wrap up.

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One Ham’s struggle to get it up.  

This blog post is reposted with link back to the original post at hamhelpdesk.com. 

Here are some details regarding the next, and probably last, phase of my 43 Foot DX Engineering vertical installation.   This post is very late. The actual date of the events within it are just before March 2009 in preparation for the Virginia QSO Party.

In the many posts within this site, it is no secret my examination of various vertical antenna solutions with comparison between BigIR and the 43 Foot products a big part of this.

Check out all the 43 Foot posts on HamHelpDesl here…  43 Foot Antenna Topic

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HOW DRY IS IT ?

It’s so dry in South Texas that…

the Baptists are starting to baptize by sprinkling,

the Methodists are using wet-wipes,

the Presbyterians are giving out rain-checks, and

the Episcopalians are praying for the wine to turn back into water.

Now THAT’s Dry!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, so it’s a lame attempt at humor. But it is too dry down here in Texas!

Looks like all current hurricane path predictions have Hurricane Bill veering north up along the Alantic eastern seaboard of the USA, instead of west into the Gulf of Mexico.  Guess Bill learned that the ham operators in Texas were prepared to respond to his visit, and decided to go look for better hunting elsewhere…  🙂

Actually, based on the track shown on www.stormpulse.com it would seem that Bill doesn’t even want to visit the eastern portion of the USA, except perhaps for a quick brush past the state of Maine?

Hurricane Bill Advisory 22 08-20 at 4pm ET

From ARRL.ORG — On August 11, the FCC announced that the cost of an Amateur Radio vanity call sign will increase $1.10, from $12.30 to $13.40.  Now that notice of the increase has been published in the Federal Register, the increase will take effect in 30 days, September 10, 2009.   The FCC is authorized by the Communications Act of 1934, As Amended, to collect vanity call sign fees to recover the costs associated with that program.  

The vanity call sign regulatory fee is payable not only when applying for a new vanity call sign, but also upon renewing a vanity call sign for a new 10 year term. The notice in the August 11, 2009 Federal Register, entitled “Assessment and Collection of Regulatory Fees for Fiscal Year 2009,” includes regulatory fees; these fees are expected to recover a total of $341,875,000 during FY2009, encompassing all the Services the FCC regulates.

For more information, see the recent ARRLWeb article, “FCC Looks to Raise Vanity Call Sign Fees for Second Consecutive Year.”

Ray Taylor (N5GAR), STX’s long-serving and dedicated SM, retired this year, resulting in a 3-way race for Section Manager of one of the ARRL’s largest Sections.

STX was lucky to have three fine hams, Lee Cooper (W5LHC) from Austin, Lou Everett (WA5LOU) from Kennard and Gary Tangrady (K5GST) from San Antonio vie to replace Ray Taylor.

The ARRL just announced the election results:

A close race between good men.

Congratulations to Lee who will officially take office on October 1, 2009.

More photos from the August 15th Cowboy Homecoming in Pleasanton, TX where Atascosa County Amateur Radio Club WA5AR had a demonstration station.  This country fair had all the usual amentities like rooster roping, bull riding, pony rides, beauty queens, home-made jewelry, ham station demonstrations, and oops!  even Longhorn Mobile operations? 

Click on photos below for larger view.

One of my favorite tracking sites is www.stormpulse.com which lets you choose which storm to track, and can see how far away it is in miles from some city (like San Antonio or Corpus Christi, etc.).

Currently as of 08/17,  this tracking authority apparently does not envision a high chance of Hurricane Bill coming to Texas, but instead predicts that it will be heading toward the eastern US coast.  Bill turned into a Hurricane status as of the morning of 08/17.

Of course, the true official hurricane forecast site is always the National Hurricane Center from the National Weather Service.