Yesterday evening, the PIO for our local ARES group called me and asked about availability for the next couple hours. It turns out that a KATU news crew was looking for some footage of how hams can offer assistance to disasters from 2500 miles away. We rushed over there and tried to have something ready before they got there.<\/p>\n
The plan was to try to use the new (as in, 48 hours new) D-STAR repeater to talk to someone in Florida, potentially about the hurricane. Not too surprisingly, 45 minutes isn’t quite enough time to coordinate something like that, and it turned out that the Florida repeater was a little busy at the time with some weather traffic (imagine that?).<\/p>\n
So, we pulled up N7IS on the D1 ARES repeater to talk about the floods last winter, and got someone from Arkansas on the IRLP node. We also had screens up of the D-RATS map showing the last known position of the guy in Florida, but I think they were a little difficult to shoot.<\/p>\n
Anyway, as a result, we were on the 11pm news last night. Only a few short snippets made it through, of course, but they made it look pretty decent. I was pleased. You can watch the video below, but be sure to pay attention to the last few words where they mention some locally-written software. That’s D-RATS!<\/p>\n
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