Public service notes
Well, it’s Labor Day and I find myself deeply steeped in public service activities. As you may know, in September we support the Evanston Bike Club’s North Shore Century (Sunday September 18). This is a great event, fun to support with a passionate and deeply appreciative client. We have been doing this for, well, many years and our support has grown. We have 34 hams who will either be staged at a rest area, work as a SAG car (we help riders) or in our net control station in Dawes Park.
We provide some pretty sophisticated services for them. Certainly voice traffic to our support teams, but we have a very rigorous software program that tracks and dispatches resources using an APRS tracker network. The APRS integrates with Google maps so we can find all of our cars and helps us better dispatch resources to a distressed caller, anywhere on the 100 mile course. We have become mission critical to the organizers and it is a perfect fit for the ham radio community. It is a really relaxing day and is very satisfying. The bike folks are amazed at what we can do and how well it all works. It is just the usual organizational madness. It has been incredibly rewarding to bring our humble hobby to a project and provide a service that really matters.
The Chicago Marathon is the mother of all ham radio events in our region. We have about 140 hams from 5 states who will help the medical volunteers better communicate with the staff at forward command. This work is much more challenging in that we are answering to city agencies, a private ambulance service, and emergency management. This requires different skill sets as we have teams deployed throughout the course, all in difficult stations with various technical challenges. We rely on 8 repeaters to provide situational awareness for this event. This project demands multiple meetings with event organizers throughout the year as they make a constant effort to improve in every way from year to year. Primarily we use a voice network, but as time moves forward we will be looking for better ways to handle data. We deploy hams from all skill levels, although our best teams have gone through many emergency communication courses that FEMA offers, because this event is a large scale inter-agency project. As of this writing, there are still openings for people to volunteer, but you will have to move quickly.
Finally, from the sublime to ”I am ready to tackle the entire computer industry.” I am under the gun to get some work done and this morning, without really any provocation, the printer decided it was time to act stupid. Now, the brilliant engineers at HP have designed a thousand blinking, dimming, flashing lights that mean nothing. You have to go on-line to get the answer – and even then…nothing. Windows 10 is no better. Ever try to find the printer queue? Oh it’s there but it took a while for me to find it.
OK, the lights are still blinking. I am about to do the old trick of throwing it against the wall to make sure it is really broken, but I give up. Flash drive to Kinko’s and, well maybe to an office store. Technology. We live and die by it.
73, Rob K9RST