Multnomah County ARES

Hello. My name is Bruce Harris and I am the Web Manager and Public Information Officer for Multnomah County ARES.

I have lived in Portland for 36 years. I live with my wife and daughter in NE Portland with our pup, Beau. We are all avid Timbers Fans and I like to ski, hike, travel and cook. I am a life long Buddhist. I own my own business in graphic arts and it has kept me very busy. In the last year I have had to reduce my volunteer activities.

It looks like I will be able to start to resume my ARES activities in the next month and I am looking forward to that very much. I come from a family of volunteers. I have been a volunteer Firefighter and EMT and eight members of my family are now or have been involved with volunteer first response for 35 years.

I started my ECOMM path back in 2003 when I took the City of Portland Neighborhood Emergency Team training. After taking the training I worked with my neighborhood team and another neighborhood team on using FRS/GMRS radios within our neighborhoods. It become apparent that we needed a way to communicate outside of neighborhoods.

At about that time I was involved in CERT-NET Rodeo (skills drill) sponsored by Washington County. During the drills all of the communications were going through Washington County ARES volunteer radio operators and I approached them and asked how to get involved. They said the first thing I needed to do was get my Amateur Radio license. So I went to Powell’s and bought the Technician study book and in 3 weeks of self study I was ready to take the test for my license.

About a month after that I found out about Multnomah County ARES and attended my first meeting. During the first year I received my General license. We were a pretty small group of people, then about six years ago the group really started to grow with the hard work of our leadership. My main interest in ARES is field work. I like to be outside using my radio. I also am very interested in the use of digital over radio communications applied to tactical uses. I have volunteered in pretty much every local event from the Portland Marathon to Hood to Coast. In that first year, I took the FEMA Public Information Officer class. At the time only 12 ARES County Public Information Officers in the country had taken the training. I also have taken the ARRL Public Information Officer Training. The Public Information Officer for any ARES group has two main responsibilities. The first, to convey any and all necessary information to the Public in a concise, accurate and timely manner so that the EC, leadership, and volunteers can spend their time fulfilling their duties. And second, to promote awareness of ARES in the community and its mission of citizen emergency communicators helping our served agencies fulfilling their response in any event.

I have many varied interests and hobbies – if you can call an ever-growing pile of unfinished projects a hobby – ranging from physical sciences, electronics, computers, radio, and metalworking, to cooking, brewing beer, traveling, and studying languages. I have a bad habit of focusing very intensely on one or two areas for a while at the expense of others, and then switching when something else catches my attention – hence the unfinished projects. While it doesn’t (directly) involve cooking or brewing beer, it seems ham radio may be the closest thing I’ve found to pull my varied interests together (though I have some ideas rattling around that involve computers, electronics, and brewing).

I’ve been interested in electronics since I was a kid. My dad was an industrial electrician and brought home lots of old electronics bits for me to investigate, though I must admit that most of my self-directed “investigation” involved more disassembly, desoldering, and sorting of components into parts bins, than learning and applying electronics theory. I do recall one particularly illuminating experiment I performed around the age of 8, which involved an electrolytic capacitor and an AC wall socket. See, I understood that capacitors would store a charge when connected in parallel with a DC source, but failed to grasp, until that moment, how they behaved in an AC circuit. A shower of sparks and a tripped circuit breaker taught me a valuable lesson or two.

All throughout my childhood, I maintained that same curiosity about electronics, but lacked an end to the means – a goal to which I could apply the concepts I was learning. I had books full of amplifier and power supply schematics, but what could I amplify? What would I power? I think all along I needed amateur radio to help guide and focus my interests, but I wasn’t even aware of its existence. The addition of a new family member in my middle school years – an 80286-based computer – sent me in a whole new direction, learning about programming, operating systems, and digital communications, which has in turn led to employment in technical support, software quality assurance, web development, system administration, and telecommunications.

Sometime around 1995, in my college years, I learned of amateur radio. I found it interesting but didn’t know anyone who was licensed, and didn’t have the time or money to pursue the hobby. When the Great Coastal Gale of 2007 cut off all communication with family on the southwest Washington coast, I felt helpless and thought again about amateur radio. I decided that earning my amateur radio license and getting trained in providing emergency communications would be one way I could make myself useful the next time a disaster struck our region. I studied hard and got my Technician license in January, 2008, then bought a J-pole and an old, used Kenwood TM-773, which I nervously sat in front of many a night before mustering the courage to key the mic and check into the Portland Amateur Radio Club’s Monday night net.

I went through the Portland Neighborhood Emergency Team training in the Winter of 2009, made my first long-distance QSO, with W6YX, via the U/v FM repeater on board the International Space Station, then upgraded my license to General. I checked into the occasional FM 2-meter net, and attended an ARES meeting or two, but otherwise remained fairly inactive until I attended the NET/CERT/ARES “radio tour” in May, 2012. That got me motivated to start volunteering for event communications, and by the end of the year I had worked at least 8 events and a fire station go-kit exercise or two, and I was hungry for more. Since then I have become more active in Multnomah County ARES, have helped organize communications for Walk MS and the Disaster Relief trials, and became the team leader for the PBEM ECC team.

In addition to emergency communications, I am also interested in amateur satellites, digital modes, software-defined radio, and, thanks to my success in the December 2013 MCARES contest-style drill-from-home and encouragement from K7ATN and others, I have a growing interest in VHF+ contesting. Maybe someday I’ll get on HF…