Blowing in the Wind

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