DAREN of WV News December 6, 2021(E83)
(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.
The weather man wasn't too far off on the snow prediction. He said one to two inches of snow was to be here this past Tuesday. We woke up to at least five inches of snow. It only lasted a couple days since we had rain the next day. While I was having to stay inside, I worked on a better antenna that we can use on the Amateur Radio Emergency Data Network (AREDN) 2.4 GHz HSMM (High Speed MultiMedia) system. We've been using diagrams of antennas that other Amateurs said worked good for them. They worked, but weren't as good as the commercial antennas that we have been using. We were buying the commercial antennas for about $85, but a few weeks ago the price went up to $135. That has slowed down intalling new nodes on the system. Yesterday I started modifying one of the collinear coaxial antennas that I made using ideas from other homemade antennas. While making the modifications, I stumbled onto a way to make the homemade antennas as good as the commercial ones. Since I was able to modify one of the antennas so that it reads the signals as good as the commercial ones, I modified five more of my homemade antennas the same way, and all of them improved the signals a lot. Today I started to build six more of the same type antennas to use on the ARDEN system. The weather man says that Friday there won't be any rain, and the temperature is supposed to be in the high 50's, low 60's. Now that we have some good antennas we're planning to install a couple more nodes on Friday. Tests at those location have already been made, so we should have a lot more coverage.
That's it for this week. If anyone has anything they would like to pass on to other, let me know.
There were 33 check-ins to the State Wide DAREN Net this week.