GM Rick, At 11:07 AM 8/27/2006, you wrote: >Hi Steve, > >I do have an 80 amp hour AGM battery under my operating position that >is kept trickle charged. While this is not that common, there are some >hams who have at least rudimentary backup power capability. In the last >year or so, there was a poll to see how many ARES/RACES HF stations in >our section had emergency power of some type. A fair number had none. Of >the broader ham population, even fewer have emergency power.
Its an easy plug and play these days, many outfits like West Mountain offer enough selection of the needed hardware/cabling for common make/model radios to take a battery and remove your existing D.C. cables and Power Pole connect your existing D.C. power supply to do just that. Anyone who wants Amateur Radio comm when the A.C. fails and its not on some other system so do just this and plan to absorb the cost of battery replacement in x number of years. >We do have emergency water for personal use and can cook with LP gas >(that is partially why we have no electric range), but we would be in >dire straits with water for cattle and would need help from emergency >management. To maintain a week or two of power is nearly impossible >since storage of fuel has safety and legal requirements. If you can not >live here, emergency communication is of limited importance. The >cheapest fuel storage I could get for diesel to meet the regs would have >been well over $1000. And that was a price quote ten years ago. One >alternative we have contemplated is using the LP gas but it is very >pricey to set up a generator system. I live in an all electric Log Home with well water here in NJ, no longer in the sticks though, my existence has been surrounded by townhouses and as soon as I can sell, its a planned relocation to the mountains of NC. The drill here has been gas generator, I almost moved up to a large propane tank/automatic generator, but with the townhouses came many changes to the rules, so that is now planned for NC, as I desire fully automated switch over to backup power for the entire house and a propane system seems to be the most efficient and lease amount of maintenance in comparison to gas or diesel. >We would not be too involved with communications issues during a severe >emergency here as we would be trying our best to work with our immediate >neighbors to help them survive. Many do not have back up power since you >need rather large generators for dairy farms, even small ones. Some have >3 point hitch generators that run off a tractor PTO, but as some found >out a while back, they can suddenly fail and are difficult to repair in >a "timely" manner. Well in such discussions as have been talking place via this forum I do not believe that relating everything to an individual personal situation with set parameters and limitations is best. Providing examples of such certainly is noteworthy, but they should not be used for taking pro/con positions. >Your ALE antenna is not something that I would normally have here at my >QTH but one could set up such as system if they wanted NVIS >communication. I am not too excited about complicated systems for >emergencies. Things frequently can go wrong. Dependence on autotuners, >computers, etc. all working well is problematic. With rigs, and a basic >antenna, I have numerous backup systems. I only will buy ~ 12 vdc rigs >so that they can connect to my dc bus as I have converted everything I >can (both mobile and fixed) to Powerpole connections for ease in >switching equipment. My 400 foot random wire NVIS antenna is simple to install and needs no ATU from 4Mhz on up installed in the clear, add more wire and that bottom Fo can be lowered, but I have no room for more than 400 feet to test here, for details see see: http://www.n2ckh.com/AAR2EY_NVIS_ANTENNA.pdf I am 95% 12 dc regarding radio equipments, some equipments only run off A.C., and a few are 24-28 vdc that are commercial/military in nature such as the MILCOM/UNIDEN 220Mhz amplifiers on my 1 1/4 meter repeater running off 28v Astron rack mount supplies, I got all that stuff NOS cheap, so there we have big rack mount UPS for short term backup. >It will be interesting if ALE becomes common on your favorite band of 6 >meters. Normally, I just look at my scope on my ICOM 756 Pro 2 and see >if there are signals on 6 meters or sometimes on 10 meters which can >also be open. Then again, if something opens on 6, a local ham (50 >miles) puts out an e-mail to that effect on our "local" ham mail group. I have no idea how much ALE will take root in the future via Amateur Radio period, I would love to see at least one station Sounding 24/7 on each Amateur Band (excluding 60m) from 160-6m from every state/province of every country in the world for propagation study where all other stations just RX and there is not two-way comm. There are similar things taking place with ALE, but not a concerted world wide effort spanning MF through to VHF. The ARS is in the position to provide this valuable service that anyone could monitor. In the MARS program we just developed an applet that takes all the received Sounding (and other two way) data received using MARS-ALE via the tools Telnet interface and parses the data and on a predefined basis automatically e-mails it to one or more addresses, one address is a Yahoo Forum just for this purpose. The data can then be mined for rendering and analysis by additional automation or manually in dozens of views depending on the focus of the analysis, I can create a network diagram for all the stations heard on one channel or one station on all the channels, or regarding two way all the stations that contacted a specific station on one channel or all channels and over a period of 1 hour or 8 hours or 1 day, its almost endless. Just looking at the trends in propagation alone is a large study, for example here in the U.S. were could focus on NVIS propagation between 160 and 30 meters centered on Kansas City, Kansas as an example. This data couple with Propagation Prediction tools is very powerful for many communications aspects, even it its a purely Amateur Radio one such as tied into my old CATCC software that performed trend analysis where I enter a list of specific callsigns and it would monitor the DX cluster so that I would determine the operating habits of a particular station interest to be on the given band and mode and day when it would mostly appear, well all for not if there was not going to good propagation between us as well, which when I last did and work on that tool was not taking into consideration in the automated process. >On having enough space for HF e-mail, it will be interesting how you >think we can handle large amounts of traffic. Even the Winlink 2000 >folks moved closed down their world wide HF mail forwarding system some >time back because they realized that things were too congested. It is OK >for emergency use, of course, but as we have mentioned before, and >concur with Bonnie, that in order to make a system work for emergency >use, it also must be used for fun stuff too or it won't be operational >when you most need it. Yes, that is a large part of the view with respect to the topic and the ARS. >If ALE played a huge part in Katrina, it was one of the best kept >secrets. Each group with a particular agenda believes that their system >was THE one that saved the day. For example Winlink 2000, by some >accounts, preempted the ARRL NTS system. I heard the SHARES system >active, but not passing very much traffic, I heard other nets in a >similar vein. Since you can not easily copy Pactor traffic, even with >the equipment, it is difficult to know what went on there. I suspect >that most of the traffic was via government sat phone, HF links, and of >course tactical communication which makes up the bulk of emergency >traffic. Some of this information may not be possible to ever find out. All those USCG helo's were making use of ALE with their support GROUPS along with other comm, ALE is an Air, Ground (portable, mobile, fixed) and Sea communications system, most people are not aware of this, they are very surprised to learn this fact. ALE is used to get the best channel for Analog and Digital Voice comm, Phone Patches and Digital Data comm, it is present in just about all Military vehicles, aircraft and ships, the following U.S. Military Joint Services document is a good read on all this: http://www.navymars.org/national/ale/FM%206-02.74_1.PDF /s/ Steve, N2CKH/AAR2EY >73, > >Rick, KV9U > > >Steve Hajducek wrote: > > >Hi Rick, > > Need a Digital mode QSO? Connect to Telnet://cluster.dynalias.org Other areas of interest: The MixW Reflector : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/themixwgroup/ DigiPol: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Digipol (band plan policy discussion) Yahoo! 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