[K3PZN-List] Hurricane du'jour

[Andy Leeds]

I have my power back and a rental car so things are looking up. This 
time my ham radio activities were limited as the PD was short handed and 
needed me on the road so I was working the 1830-0630 shift. I helped 
setup the NCS station at the Red Cross, while we have a world class HF 
contest station (the "Florida Boys" use it often in the RTTY contests) 
the VHF side is just a mobile radio so we always end up installing some 
additional VHF equipment. We operate 4 nets in the county North, 
Central, South, and EOC so that is a minimum of 2 VHF rigs at a time. 
The best thing we did this time around was have footswitch and headsets 
for the operators so they could type with both hands and not have to 
pick up a mic. We also used computer logging to simplify the logs, by 
next year I hope to have some fancier software to help the 2 operators 
work together more efficiently.

I can say first hand that we lost the county 800MHz system during the 
storm at of course the worst moment. I was sent out on a call after lock 
down (at a certain point they call all the police officers into the 
station and only respond to some high priority calls) with another 
officer. While trying to work this call we dropped off the radio forcing 
another officer to respond to check if we were OK. We didn't have 
reliable 800 for the next 2 days (its still a little spotty) and our 
mobile computers are useless (except for solitaire).

The roof blew off one of the special needs shelters at about 0230 Sunday 
and we had to move about 350 people to another facility. Many of these 
people were bedridden or in wheelchairs and the paramedics and police 
who went out on that call did a great job (I wasn't one of them, I was 
waiting in the station to go in the second wave but some deputies showed 
up and we didn't go). There was a lot of radio traffic the hams passed 
during and after that event to settle everything down and account for 
everyone.

The biggest thing that happened to me was the lights over employee 
parking at the PD fell over and one landed on my truck. Its at the body 
shop and I'm awaiting the butcher bill. Other than that things are OK my 
tower is still up, the 6m beam and vhf vertical are fine.

73,
Andy