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Last Saturday, I got to put on my spiffy, brand-new N1HIT shirt and answer questions about D-Star at Boxboro, the ARRL New England Division Convention, where N1HIT had a booth. Great crowd and a lot to see.

Before Boxboro officially started, I drove down on Friday and took an 8 hour class on ICS 100. ICS is the Incident Command System,

“A standardized on-scene emergency management construct specifically designed to provide for the adoption of an integrated organizational structure that reflects the complexity and demands of single or multiple incidents, without being hindered by jurisdictional boundaries.”

Basically, ICS enables all the different groups that respond to an emergency (a car accident, a forest fire, a major terrorist act, etc.) to operate as one unified force. For us hams, I feel that we must understand and be able to operate under the Incident Command System and the National Incident Management System (NIMS). I’ve taken the ARRL Emergency Communications Course 1 (EC-001) and plan on taking the remaining two courses as well as continuing with ICS training. That said, all the classes and books in the world on handling an emergency are not going to be of much help unless you practice. Tonite, I’ll be the Net Control Station/Operator for our weekly ARES Net. I’m off to prepare my notes.

Amateur Radio

It’s been an interesting summer. Got the HF dipole up (it rocks, signal reports have been very positive) and the electrical storms have kept me busy.

The past several weeks have seen a lot of rainy afternoons with strong winds and lightning here in Southern NH. We even had an EF-1 to EF-2 tornado cause some major damage and, sadly, a death and injuries. My home was far from the path of the tornado and spared any damage but I’m working diligently on a better grounding system for my radios with lightning arrestors and other improvements. The first and easiest step I took was to better protect the HF balun from the elements. Here are a few pics of the housing I put together to keep the balun relatively dry and above the snow line come winter.

Amateur Radio

This past Saturday, with the help of K1PV, K1YU, KB1PMT and W1GEK, I put up a Cobra Senior antenna in my backyard. Using K1PV’s pneumatic tennis ball launcher (see this for an example), we were able to get both ends of the dipole up and over some tall pines. The feed point is approximately 65′ high with the ends slightly higher due to the fact that I don’t have an adequate way to support the center. Dacron cord was used for support and we secured one end to a strong tree while the other end is secured to a substantial but flexible limb in the woods to give the Cobra some flex in high winds. I’m using a 4:1 Unadilla Balun to connect the ladder line to 100′ of RG-8X coax. I’ll shorten the coax since I have more than enough to reach the shack. Soon I’ll look into getting some coax with a lot less loss. I picked up an LDG Z-11 Pro auto antenna tuner and it’s been working great with my new Cobra and the FT-990.

I’ve been too busy with work and preparing for Field Day to spend a lot of time trying out the new antenna. I did participate in a net Sunday morning on 75M and I was 20 over or more to those that gave me a signal report! Here are some pictures from the antenna install:

Amateur Radio

Last night I took a SKYWARN training and certification class in Nashua NH sponsored by Hillsborough County ARES. Excellent instructor. Now I just need to get my weather station running and feeding data out via APRS.

Amateur Radio