For most of my ham career, I’ve had this saying of “reliability first” and then the rest will follow.
Essentially, you can’t be on the air contesting, chasing DX or supporting your local emergency agencies if your equipment and antennas are not working.
In my experience, things usually break when we don’t pay attention to the details surrounding the setup of our equipment. We use the spare, wrong sized bolt on our tower, we skip the grounding until later, we ignore maintenance, or we do something so that it is just good enough.
In our installations, good enough usually results in failures at the exact time of need.
This morning, I was reminded of this yet again. Kate and I are staying in a bed and breakfast in Seaside, OR, doing a little bit of recovery from the layoff last week — spending time with each other and watching the waves roll in.
Just before 5 AM, we awoke to the full fury of a fairly large storm, packing 15-foot waves, lots of rain, and winds of 50 MPH gusting to 70 MPH. The wind started at 2 AM and continued until 8 AM this morning.
Relentless.
This, of course was after a storm two weeks ago here where the inn we are staying at was without power for six days and they experienced sustained 65 MPH winds for five full days with wind gusts recorded as high as 129 MPH. Hurricanes have nothing on this sort of force.
I’m not complaining of the storms nor their effects. But it was clear to me that if your ham radio station wasn’t already ready for such a force, ready for the power to be out, ready to help emergency agencies in their work, you weren’t going to be fixing much in the middle of these sorts of storms and their aftermath.
Is your station reliable and ready? What action items are outstanding that if completed would make your station reliably ready?
Scot, K9JY
Photo Credit: Hideki Saito
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Bob VE3MPG 12.19.07 at 3:59 pm
Lot of good points Scot. Up here in Canada, eastern Canada, we’re reminiscing about the famous ice storm that occurred up this way 10 years ago. The fury of that ice storm left some in rural areas with no power for up to 30 days. A lot of hams helped out during that emergency and as a result of that lesson we’re all better prepared - too bad the disasters have to happen for us to be better prepared. Let’s hope we are.
The very best Scot to you and your family,
Bob in The Great White North
Scot, K9JY 12.19.07 at 9:25 pm
Bob — It actually takes some sort of disaster to get the motivations right. One can’t be prepared for everything, of course, but usually it takes the wake up call to get things done instead of doing the preventative work before the wake up call happens.
We live, we learn. I just want people to learn early!