DAREN of WV News December 16, 2012(.A66)
WA8LLM (304) 679-3470 wa8llm@yahoo.com
WOOD COUNTY EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
P.O. BOX 3328, PARKERSBURG, WV 26103
http://www.wc8ec.org
DAREN News, are articles and information about the Digital Amateur Radio "Emergency" Network of WV, which operates on 145.69 MHz. Anyone having any information about DAREN, or Amateur Radio in general, and would like to share it with others, may send it to WA8LLM @ PKBGWV on 145.69 MHz, or to my E-Mail: wa8llm@yahoo.com. A State Wide DAREN NET is operated every Saturday from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, and lately, before and after those hours. The DAREN Net Announcement, showing the MAIN NCS, ALTERNATE NCS, NODEs accessible to both, and the previous week's check-ins, are posted by Thursday on most of the Main county DAREN PBBS'. The DAREN News can also be found on the wc8ec.org website.
There was some kind of problem with the Wirt County NODE/PBBS of WIRTWV/ELZBWV, in the past couple of weeks. I made a trip to the tower site on Wednesday, to install a remote receiver for the 147.255 MHz voice repeater. While I was at the site I worked on the NODE/PBBS. It seems to be working okay again. On Friday I went to the Washington County, OH, tower site and re-installed the NODE/PBBS of WASHOH/MRTAOH. The station went off the air several months ago, but I was unable to get access to the cabinet where the station is installed. I was finally able to get access to the cabinet, and removed the station to take it home and work on it. It looks like the only problem with the station was the batteries. The power supply and station were okay. There still seems to be a problem, but I think it may be the antenna. The station doesn't seem to be as good as when it was first installed. It could have been band conditions, but only time will tell.
After the hospital exercise on December 6th, I received suggestions for a protocol when using the Chat Room system of CHATRM. Since then Sammy Mercer, N8SVX, and I have been logging into the Chat Room on a daily basis, and trying different procedures to make communicating through the Chat Room better. So far some of the items that we have came up with is using a flag at the beginning and ending of comments that are being made. Since the Chat Room system doesn't use time stamping when comments are being made, we start each comment or comments with the local time, using 2400 system. We flag the end of our comments with something that indicates we are finished, such as: ...-k- or -k- or ???-k- etc. We also use capital letters for all of the comments, since it's easier to read, and you don't have to keep shifting from lower to upper case, and back all the time. If messages, such as the ARRL RADIOGRAM are sent, it's easy enough to capture and print the message on paper to hand off to whoever needs it. Also the Chat Room doesn't wrap sentences down to the next line, so it's best to press an <enter> when you get near the end of a line (70 to 80 characters). If the sentence is going to be on the next line down, it's best to press both a <space> and an <enter> at the end of each line, otherwise the first two words will be ran together on the next line down. These are some of the things that we have came up with so far. We are thinking of starting a Chat Room Net so everyone can practice using it. Sammy and I are in the Chat Room just about every day. If you want to join us, you are more than welcome to do so. We are not always in front of the computer, we just take a look at the screen once in a while to see if there are any comments, so you may, or may not get a response right back. Anyway, if you want to join us, connect to the Chat Room NODE of CHATRM from any DAREN NODE that you can reach the Ritchie County NODE of RITCWV, since they are both connected to the same radio. Type a "U" to see if anyone is in the Chat Room. There is also a "LOGGER" that is saving comments to a file, it won't answer back.
There were only 45 check-ins to the State Wide DAREN Net this week.