DAREN of WV News February 22, 2015 (.B81)
WA8LLM (304) 679-3470 wa8llm@yahoo.com
WOOD COUNTY EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS, P.O. BOX 3328, PARKERSBURG, WV 26103
http://www.wc8ec.com
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.com website.
I hope spring gets here soon; I've had enough snow and cold temperatures to last the rest of the year. There haven’t been any messages or any information from anyone, so I don't have much to report.
Since it's been too cold to go outside and work, I've been working on at least one project that I need to get completed in the next couple of months. I have been building some racing clocks to be used for the road races and cross country races that we provide safety communications for. We usually have a communicator at each of the Mile Markers of the races. The communicator helps the Race Timer set their stop watches so the runners will know their running time. The Race Timer has to yell out the race time as the runners pass the Mile Marker. We thought that since we are going to have radio operators at each of the locations anyway, that maybe we could also provide a clock for the runners to see. We figure that by helping with the timing, the race officials will look at Amateur Radio operators as more than people that talk on a radio. I put the project on hold for a few months while I was getting the new Wood County Emergency Communications trailer ready to be put into operation. The weather has just been too cold and snowy to work on it, so I thought I would work on some inside projects.
There are still other projects that I need to work on, and one of them is to try to repair some Kantronics KPC-3 TNCs that have been damaged over the years. Since the KPC-3 units have been going up in price, it might be better to repair some of the bad ones. I've never had a whole lot of luck repairing them, but I have fixed a few of them. Since I have several that need repaired, maybe I can take two or three of them to get one working.
There were only 39 check-ins to the State Wide DAREN Net this week. There was one new participant to the net this week and that was Andrew Grimm, KD8RYP, from Mason WV. I want to welcome Andrew to the DAREN system and hope he can participate in the net as often as possible.
That's it for this week. How about sending me something to write about so that I don't have to ramble each week. I'm sure that other Amateur Radio operators in the state are busy doing something.