[BARC-List] E. Mass. SET Results

[Joel N. Weber II]

> What  additional served agencies do you have in mind?
> So far thanks to BARC, Salvation Army is playing, Red Cross played, a few
> Community EOCs participated. We'd like to invite more agencies to
> participate.  Do you have any specific suggestions besides the above?

I know that the Red Cross played in WMA, but I wasn't aware of any EMA
participation.

I know that KB1CVH participated from the Somerville public safety
building in Union Sq for some portion of the SET, but I know that I've
personally never talked to any Somerville public safety officials in a
ham radio context.  (I've called the police to report minor crimes,
and my uncle who's a firefighter in CT went to the local fire station
with me once to ask about the local rules for smoke alarms, but that
hardly identifies me as a ham who might be able to help them in some
way at some point in the future.)

The Somerville hospital looks like it's in a really nice location in
terms of being reasonably high up, and it's also very close to where I
live.  And I know that somewhere on the internet there's information
about how hams can be valuable to hospitals.  However, if the number
of hams who participate in the SET is an accurate reflection of the
number of hams that would help out in a real emergency, it's not clear
to me what services we could reasonably expect to offer to the
hospital given the number of operators we have.  (In terms of
statistics for just Somerville, I think there's somewhere around 100
licensed hams according to the FCC database, and I'm aware of two of
us (me, and KB1CVH) who participated in the SET.)

    Agreed... At the State EOC, we did need to resort to headphones for much of
   the HF operation and pretty much at all times when receiving any traffic on
   VHF stations. If you're just in monitor mode, it's ok to unplug and put
   things on low volume, even most of the MEMA dispachers like to have our
   stations on at low levels while in operation so that they can hear what's
   going on. But if you've got to copy any messages, the place is just too loud
   in normal circumstances. Every go kit should include headphone if not a full
   headset with the appropriate adapters.

Did we ever get any sort of go kit description on emaares.com?  If we
did, I can't find it, and it feels like we should have one and should
incrementally add things like this.

I frequently carry earbuds that won't do much to block out background
noise, and it's useful to know that I should bring a set of headphones
that will block out background noise as well; I hadn't realized that
before I saw your mail.