All,
A personal thanks for your participation in this exercise. We have 156 people on our standard email distribution list. Special thanks to Mark Johnson (W5PTX), Rick Leonhardt (NN7ET), Dan Beard (KB7JZI) and Bill Townsend (KJ5ABG). Each of them at times helped with digging out contact information on a number of hams, more on that in a moment, and through their efforts we signed another 117 up for this exercise. That means that each time we sent an update at least 273 ham operators received it. The open rate was very high and I hope that some of the non-Club member recipients will decide to join the Club going forward.
Also developed for this exercise, not completed but functionally capable and showing great promise as a “proof of concept” item, is a Google Earth Pro distributable (see static image below). Through the efforts of those mentioned above, we were able to pull data on a geographically dispersed set of amateur radio operators in the Red River Valley area of operations (Bryan, McCurtain and Choctaw counties in OK, Fannin, Lamar, Hunt, Delta, Red River, Franklin and Titus counties in TX). This data will continue to be refined and continued outreach to other operators in the area will be an ongoing project.
The distributable was sent to all the other amateur radio club presidents in the surrounding counties, with instructions for how to tailor it to their own needs. Going forward that distributable and a companion website plugin will be useful for tracking APRS beacons at events like Tour de Paris. And if we can obtain an appropriate radar data stream, we hope to integrate that feature into a “all in one” tactical display with layers that can be turned on or off. This will help keep operators and those monitoring operators, such as staff at the Emergency Operations Center, situationally aware of the big picture.
Congratulations to all. We have received a lot of complimentary remarks reference how smoothly our part of the operation went. From those that performed as net control operators to those that checked in and provided reports; this exercise demonstrated the value that the RRVARC and amateur radio operators provide the community.
73
Phillip Beall (W5EBC)
