[W8MWA] Skywarn proceedings

[Randy Crowe]

The MWA at our monthly August meeting proposed to rejoin Skywarn. We 
will, or Jeff - WB1AAL will, notify the directors of NWS Pittsburgh and 
the skywarn amateur radio operations coordinator for our area, Fred 
McMullen and Eddie Misiewicz, KB3YRU, that the MWA and the W8MWA 
repeater are back on Skywarn.

Jim or Jeff will normally call up the net during severe or winter 
weather conditions. The procedure, as I see it, would be to have the net 
go into monitoring mode on the W8MWA two-meter repeater during a weather 
watch situation and ask all stations to monitor the repeater. The net 
would go into an active call up during a warning or station reported 
weather event.

Reports should be funneled to the appropriate NWS office. Monongalia, 
Marion, Preston and Wetzel area reports would be sent to the Pittsburgh 
NWS. Harrison, Tucker, and other West Virginia counties would be sent to 
the Charleston NWS office. .

Fred suggests that this information should be sent in to the NWS by a 
Skywarn Trained Observer as they would have the training and knowledge 
required to filter the reports to determine which reported items are 
necessary to the NWS and which are not. However, club members and net 
participants should be encouraged to enroll in NWSChat 2.0. 
This would allow stations to use NWSChat 2.0 to submit reports directly 
if they wished. Still, their reports should still be passed on to the 
Net Control and/or the Skywarn Trained Observer. The NWS does not have 
the ability to monitor all repeaters in the coverage area, however with 
the implementation of NWSChat, they can easily communicate with all 
reporting areas in one application and better assess conditions.

More details and procedures to come, but the gist of this whole thing is 
to better serve the public service needs of our community. Please turn 
on your radios, mobile - base - handheld - scanner - etc.,  and monitor 
our repeater during weather related events.

Skywarn training is available both online and, occasionally, in a group 
session locally. More details and links for online training will follow 
in a separate email.

Randy
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