DAREN of WV News April 12, 2009 (.874)
Kenneth Harris WA8LLM (304) 679-3470 wa8llm@yahoo.com
WOOD COUNTY EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
P.O. BOX 3328, PARKERSBURG, WV 26103
http://www.wc8ec.com
DAREN News, are articles and information about the Digital Amateur Radio "Emergency" Network of WV, which operates on 145.69 MHz. Anyone having any information about DAREN, or Amateur Radio in general, and would like to share it with others, may send it to WA8LLM @ PKBGWV on 145.69 MHz, or to my E-Mail: wa8llm@yahoo.com. A State Wide DAREN NET is operated every Saturday from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, and lately, before and after those hours. The DAREN Net Announcement, showing the MAIN NCS, ALTERNATE NCS, NODEs accessible to both, and the previous week's check-ins, are posted by Thursday on most of the Main county DAREN PBBS'. The DAREN News can also be found on the wc8ec.com website.
When I started the News this morning i noticed that I had the wrong date on last week's News. Last week's DAREN News should have been dated April 5, 2009.
When I worked on the Wood County NODE/PBBS of WOODWV/PKBGWV last week I missed one very important command. I forgot to tell the station how many NODE channels it should have. The command NUMNODES was set to zero. That meant the station couldn't be used as a NODE. If you would have tried to connect to WOODWV, you would have had no success. It was okay as a Digipeater, but not as a NODE. The station now has eight NODE channels available for use.
Our communications group is operating a Free Coffee Safety Break at the Welcome Center on Interstate I-77 at Williamstown. From that location you can see the tower which hosts the Washington County, Ohio, NODE/PBBS of WASHOH/MRTAOH. After we got the safety break trailer set up, I put the Packet Radio station in operation. I was able to connect to the PBBS of MRTAOH, but I wasn't able to connect to the NODE of WASHOH. I tried to connect to the remote access by going in the back door, and that didn't work either. I connected to the Wood County NODE of WOODWV and looked at the NODE list that it had heard. I found the problem with the WASHOH NODE. The NODE name was garbled up. Instead of being WASHOH it was WASHoH, with a small o. It's not possible to have a case sensitive ALIAS for the NODE, PBBS, Remote Access or Callsign. If you type the information into the above, with small letters, they will be changed to capital letters. The only way to correct the problem is to make a trip to the site and give the TNC a Hard Reset. I may try to do that today when I go to the Safety Break to pull the trailer out, since it's only about a mile from that location.
There will be special W5YI VE testing on May 30th in Wood County. The state Emergency Medical Services has received a grant to get as many Public Safety workers such as Police, Fire, EMS, Rescue, Health Department, Red Cross, etc., licensed as Amateur Radio operators. The testing session will be an Amateur Radio cram course. It will start at 9:00 am with the reading of the questions in Technician Question Pool, and ending with the administering of the Amateur Radio test. If you know of any Public Safety workers that would like to get their license, now is the time. The class/testing will be held at the Wood County Civil Air Patrol building near the Wood County Airport on Route 31 between Waverly and Williamstown. There is no cost for the class or the taking of the test. Please pass this information on to every one.
There were 58 check-ins to this week's State Wide DAREN Net. Tom Martin, WW8TM, needs only one more check-in to make 600. There were four new operators who checked into the net this week and they were: Jerry Wilson, KD8JNH, from Walker; Mark Stull, AB8WV, from Parkersburg; Mike Amos, KB8ZBU, from Parkersburg; and Chris Hinton, KC8QKO, from Williamstown. I think all of these operators used the Packet station that was operational in the Communications Trailer that is being used as a Concession Trailer at the Free Coffee Safety Break in Williamstown. I hope I can keep them interested in Packet Radio.