[FARC] For those of you that might be interested

[Iain McFadyen]

USARC5 is assigned to one of 11 American Red Cross trucks like this one:

http://www.ecrv4712.org/ECRV4712/equipment.cfm

Or see the website:

http://ecrv4703.org

It is most likely deployed somewhere around 20-30 miles north of New Orleans, or Biloxi, or Beaumont right now, awaiting Gustav landfall.

Some trucks have Micom 2E, some have Micom 3F. They have the ability to operate an SGC 500w brick amplifier whilst mobile to a HF whip, but this generally means that they cannot frequency hop (and the swaying whip causes varying SWR whilst mobile, which trips the amplifier offline), so they stick to 100 watts barefoot/single channel when mobile. When stationary, they have a fan dipole kit on board, to allow frequency hopping to several of the SHARES freqs without retuning.

The truck uses KuBand satellite to communicate back to ARC HQ in the DC area, and the ALE/HF is often a backup, or used for NVIS/regional communications only.

PR13 is Puerto Rico. Maybe making a test call in preparation for Hanna. Or inadvertently left in the Micom memory since the last time it was used.

Iain
--- On Sun, 8/31/08, Howard W3CQH <hsgorden at comcast.net> wrote:


15094.0 USARC5 - Probable US American Red Cross, Unknown
location, calling PR13, another unknown location using 
ALE/USB at 1847 on SHARES SCN channel 7.