Friday, February 12, 2010

Feb 12 Winter Weather Event in Savannah

Well a good swath of Georgia got some sleet and snow this evening. We got about half an inch in parts of Savannah with some of the inland counties getting as much as 2.5 inches. Once the rain started turning into sleet and then snow, a number of amateur radio operators and Skywarn weather spotters gathered on our local ARES designated repeater to deliver weather reports to pass on to the National Weather Service in Charleston. NWS Charleston has responsibility for twelve Coastal Georgia counties and really depend on weather spotters to provide real time weather updates. We established communications with the NWS Charleston office amateur radio station WX4CHS first on 3.975 and then moved to one of the South Carolina repeaters. As Dan-KF4MND who is the new DEC for NWS Charleston began to gather reports from Chatham, Effingham, Bulloch, Bryan, Liberty and Long counties, I relayed the reports to WX4CHS via the 146.715 repeater in Whitehall, SC. We continued to feed reports to Charleston until the snow had passed through the area. This was another great opportunity to exercise our ARES and Skywarn procedures. Great job all around.

Georgia Baptist Disaster Relief Article

Here's an article in the current issue of The Christian Index about our communications unit with the Georgia Baptist Disaster Relief Team.



CARS March Meeting

The March monthly meeting of the Coastal Amateur Radio Society will be held at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Pooler. We will meet at the museum on Wed, Mar 3rd at 7:00pm where we will hear from Jerry McLaughlin, the "City of Savannah" Restoration Project Manager. Jerry will give us an update on the restoration of the B-17 and we will get to see the aircraft and associated radio compartment equipment.

Technician Class Session #3

Session #3 of the Technician Class went very well this past Thursday evening. Everyone is following along nicely and seems to be having a good time. We covered antennas, feedlines, and made it all the way through chapter 4 of the study guide. Next week will be our last session and we'll be covering licensing regulations, operating regulations, and electrical and RF safety. Then we'll wrap it up with a review.