Emergency Communications

From ARRL Web: 10/07/2020 – The Hurricane Watch Net (HWN), WX4NHC at the National Hurricane Center (NHC), and The Salvation Army’s SATERN have announced activations for Hurricane Delta, the latest Atlantic storm. The HWN moved to its Alert Level 4 on Wednesday and is now running on 14.325 MHz. WX4NHC monitors the same frequency to gather “ground truth” reports from radio amateurs that may assist NHC forecasters. As of 1200 UTC, the NHC warned that Delta was bringing “a life-threatening storm surge and strong winds” to the northeastern portions of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where it made landfall at 1030 UTC. Maximum sustained winds from …

QST de W1AW  ARRL Bulletin 23  ARLB023 From ARRL Headquarters  Newington CT  September 16, 2020 To all radio amateurs SB QST ARL ARLB023 ARLB023 Northern Florida ARES Requests Clear Frequencies for HF Nets Northern Florida Section Emergency Coordinator Karl Martin, K4HBN, is requesting that stations not directly involved in the Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) response to Hurricane Sally please avoid 3.950 MHz (primary) and 7.242 MHz (backup). ARES has activated in four Northern Florida counties. Shelters are open, and power and telecommunications outages are widespread, Martin reports. NNNN /EX

From ARRL Web: 09/15/2020 – The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has announced that two 60-meter channels have been made available, as necessary, for interoperability between US Government stations and US amateur radio stations involved in emergency communications related to the wildland firefighting response in California, Oregon, and Washington, and to Hurricane Sally. These interoperability channels will remain active until the need for these channels no longer exists: Channel 1 — primary voice traffic 5332 kHz channel center, 5330.5 kHz USB voice Channel 2 — digital traffic 5348 kHz channel center, 5346.5 kHz USB with 1.5-kHz offset to center of …

Frank O’Laughlin, WQ1O, writes on Facebook: Cape and Islands conducted its annual summer field communications exercise on Saturday, August 8, 2020. Exercise #68 “Operation Windbreaker” had three primary field sites, several individual field ops and several home stations. The main sites were: outside the Sandwich Human Services Building, outside of Falmouth Hospital, and in Eastham near Larry, K1LRJ, home area. VHF signals were excellent. The HF voice operation went quite well with our Cape/Islands stations as well as the off-Cape stations that hosted a 75-meter net over 75 miles away in another part of MA. Digital modes on HF had …