[CALV-ARES] Snowstorm After Action Report

[N3AE]

Eric, 

Some feedback: 



    * My hours are incorrect per my recent email to you. 14 hours is more like it. 


    * 
"All stations could utilize the CALV01 repeater" is too optimistic a statement. Reality was that we had a lot of problems with excessive noise on the repeater (source unknown) during the storm. VERY hard to copy even know strong stations. About as bad as I have heard it. Had to employ simplex on occasion. 


    * 
"A call-up should have been completed at onset of the activation." Disagree in this respect. A day before the storm I sent an email to the AUXCOM reflector alerting all that we would likely be going to standby the next day and all should monitor the repeater. Similar email sent the next day when we did go to standby. I think it's a reasonable assumption that AUXCOM members would be anticipating and looking at their emails with the advance warning we had from NWS and news services. Telephone tree was not necessary. Now, had this been a sudden pop up event like an forecaster derecho wind, it would be another matter. 


    * 
I believe CALV APRS was off the air at the time as part of the repeater troubleshooting. Charles APRS was up (I think). Never occurred to me to use APRS text since internet stayed up and reporters were sending emails as backups to over-the-air. 


    * 
"Stations sent all messages informally and sometimes by email" Correct, but email was IN ADDITION to over-the-air reporting in almost all cases. Some redundancy to circumvent noisy repeater. 


    * 
Agree with comments regarding need for LWS feedback. Since they did send one feedback message back to you, suggest you follow up with them. Was the Excel sheet approach acceptable? What other fields if any would they have liked to see (temperature, etc)? Curious.... for a snow event, do they accept "official" snow amounts from spotters if they have only Basic Skywarn training, or is Winter Storm required as well ? Need to add Spotter Numbers to reporting. 

Shawn 




----- Original Message -----

From: "Eric Christensen" <eric at christensenplace.us> 
To: "Bill" <n3xmz.md at gmail.com>, "Shawn Donley" <n3ae at comcast.net>, "Peter Holt" <mistralholt at comcast.net> 
Sent: Sunday, January 31, 2016 1:24:15 PM 
Subject: Snowstorm After Action Report 

Attached is what I came up with after the snowstorm based on the feedback I 
received. Any updates/changes to this? 

73, 
Eric 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/calv-ares/attachments/20160131/01fc26c5/attachment.html>