To show, or not to show… that is the question.
Are we running out of gas for HRN, or just a temporary lull. Hard to tell. This is Gary’s solo thoughts on the topic, but we’ll have a conversation about it soon.
Also, how to keep ham radio from turning into Fox News.
Ham Radio activity - ‘unofficial’ and ad hoc as it may be - continues in the mountains of western North Carolina. The Mt. Mitchell 145.19 repeater remains active every day. For this show, we talk to a ham who was deployed at a couple of locations last week. Steve McAtee N0JJO lives in the Charlotte NC area, and heard a call go out for hams to assist. He geared up and set out, and now that he’s back, he tells us his story.
We know that Hurricane Milton hit Florida last week, and undoubtedly there are ham radio stories to tell from that event. We’ll see if we can find some hams to tell there stories from Milton in the next few weeks (contact Gary at kn4aq@arvn.tv if you have one of those stories).
Last week, HRN hosts David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ talked about some ad-hoc ham radio nets that spun up just after Tropical Storm Helene devastated a large area of North Carolina’s mountains, knocking out power, internet, phone and cell communications, flooding towns and destroying roads. The nets appeared to have no connection to any formal ham radio emcom organization. Initially they were passing lots of incoming Health & Welfare inquiries from hams or friends of hams on 40 meters (7232 kHz) and an ultra-wide coverage repeater on Mt. Mitchel (145.19 MHz). We speculated that messages like that probably couldn’t be delivered.We even streamed a few hours of the 40 meter net on our YouTube channel.
On this show we get the background. Dan Gitro K2DMG became the Net Control station on the Mt. Mitchel repeater for days on end, and he joins us to talk about how it got started and what it became as the days went by.
