Feb 3, 2010 Statewide Tornado Drill

Amateur Radio Operators in Chatham and surrounding counties participated in the annual statewide tornado drill in conjunction with the Severe Weather Awareness Week in Georgia. At approximately 0900 the National Weather Service in Peachtree City issued an exercise statewide tornado warning. The Georgia ARES activated a statewide Skywarn net on our primary frequency of 3.975 Mhz and many county programs throughout the state activated local Skywarn nets. I activiated the Chatham County Area Skywarn net on our primary ARES VHF frequency of 146.970 at approximately 0910 and began to take checkins for operators throughout the region. As folks checked in, I logged thier name, call letters, location, and Skywarn Weather Spotter number. We had great participation with a total of 16 checkins from Chatham, Effingham, Bryan, Liberty, and Long Counties. We also had participation from our local EMA and TSA.
This was really good considering I had not given anyone information regarding this drill ahead of time. So it was truly a "no notice" exercise. Many of us also checked into the statewide net on 3975 with Charles-K4GK acting as NCS.

After the exercise was complete, we terminated the local net and Greg-N4VAD sent our local net report to GEMA via WINLINK. Overall a very good exercise. Thanks to all who participated and thank you for being prepared to move weather related traffic.

New Coastal Amateur Radio Society Website

Check out our newly improved website for the Coastal Amateur Radio Society. Kevin-KW4B has done an awesome job building it for the club. Still a few more things to do and some content to add but it's looking really good.

http://www.w4lhs.com/

We also now have our club newsletter "Groundwaves" posted on the site. Enjoy the Feb 2010 issue now. http://www.coastalamateurradiosociety.net/PDF/GW201002.pdf

B-17 "City of Savannah" Radio Compartment Restoration

We have a very unique opportunity to contribute to the restoration of a piece of American history. We were contacted a couple weeks ago about our interest in helping to restore the radio compartment of the B-17 that is currently undergoing a thorough restoration at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum here in Savannah. Wow, of course we’re interested! The B-17 has been at the museum now for a full year and the focus has been on a very detailed cleaning. Now the team is ready to begin planning for the restoration.

On Jan 20th Mac-KF4LMT and Guy-K4GTM went over to the museum to meet with Jerry McLaughlin who is the Project Manager of the restoration. Jerry and Marshall Brooks took us onto the aircraft where we got a good look at the radio compartment. Afterwards, we went into the artifacts room to check out all of the radio equipment and associated gear. Wow, what a treasure. We then spent some time with Jerry and Marshall discussing how we might be able to contribute to this effort.


Some of the next steps will be to research what exactly should be in the compartment, determine the feasibility of making some of the radio gear operational, helping the museum acquire any missing equipment, and of course installing the equipment in the radio room. Whew, lots to do. This should be an extremely rewarding project. Stay tuned for more information. Learn more about this project on the Mighty Eight website at http://www.mightyeighth.org/.