DAREN of WV News August 30, 2020(E69)
(304) 679-3470 wa8llm@yahoo.com
Wood County Emergency Communications, 319 Communications Dr, Waverly, WV 26184
www.wc8ec.com or 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 www.wc8ec.com and www.wc8ec.org websites.
Sometime Thursday night/Friday morning the Wood County Emergency Communications 147.255 MHz voice repeater went off the air. We had a storm that went through the area Thursday night, and figured the power was off at the tower site. Since I had my Packet station set up for the State Wide DAREN Net, and I didn't think of it, I didn't check on the Ritchie County DAREN Node/PBBS of RITCWV/HRVLWV. Both the voice repeater and the Ritchie County Node/PBBS are at the same location. On Monday I received an E-Mail from Gene Roy, N8ER, asking me if the Ritchie County station was off the air, and I told him I thought the power was off. I figured it would take a couple days for the power company to get the power back on since the tower location is out in the middle of nowhere. There are back batteries at the tower site, but they are not much good anymore. When the tower owners put a paging transmitter at the site, they connected their 100 Amp Power Supply to the batteries. The only thing they did wrong was they didn't adjust the power supply output voltage. The power supply was putting out 13.8 Volts, and the batteries weren't a bit happy. After a few months the batteries were overcharged and swelling up. With the batteries no longer any good, the two stations didn't have any back-up power. If the stations don't come back on the air in a couple days, I will need to make a trip to the tower site and found out what is going on.
Sammy Mercer, N8SVX, will be coming out to my house this coming Monday morning. We are going to check out some antennas that may be used on the HSMM (High Speed Multimedia) 2.4 GHz system. I've always been told the antenna is the key to any radio system, and I think that is the case with our HSMM. We may have a report on them next week.
I think that with the Ritchie County NODE/PBBS down a few operators weren't able to check into the State Wide DAREN Net this week. There were only 26 check-ins to the net. There was one new participate to the net this week and that was Edward (Ned) Raybould from Marietta, OH. I want to welcome Ned to the DAREN system, and hope he can participate in the net as often as he can.