Happy New Year! We hope everyone is ready to have a fun and productive year in the amateur radio world. We certainly started off with a great simplex net on January 3.
The Leadership team met on December 10 for an all-day planning session and reviewed the membership survey. We believe that the coming year is full of opportunities to sharpen our members’ skills and continue training of our newest members. We will continue to have team exercises and have added a couple of all team drills to the mix. This year Multnomah County ARES will have its own Field Day on June 23-24. A central location is being finalized.
Thanks to Rachel KI7NMB for volunteering to take on the Net Manager position and to Patti KB7GMM for taking the Net Content Coordinator position. We look forward to adding content to our weekly nets. Patti will be working hard to make this happen. Emily N7EMH has agreed to take on the Bravo Team Leader position; Matthew AF7PV will stay on as the PBEM Station Chief for the time being. Thanks to Emily for taking on this important role.
Our new training manager, John KI7LYP, has a great line up of training topics for the monthly meetings and several Saturday workshops throughout the year. Many of our monthly trainings will start off with all members and then split into beginning and advanced classes. Hopefully this will add a better learning experience for both our newer and older members. The Saturday workshops – the first being the February 3 J-pole building party – are designed to help with equipment needs and operating skills. We hope our members will take advantage of these opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills, and to build their stations and go kits to a higher level.
A quick review of 2017 shows we had a total of 2,596 volunteer hours for the year. Way to go everyone! We are starting the New Year with 83 active members and we will continue our membership drive in hopes of reaching the goal of 100 members this year. We appreciate everyone’s efforts on passing the word to friends and family as 2017 was a very high growth year. Please keep up the great work! If you have any outreach ideas, let Steve W7SRH know at PIO [at] MultnomahARES [dot] org.
The UASI grant order for the repeater kits has been completed and we are expecting to pick up the equipment any day now. The kits will include a full UHF Ham repeater and two portable VHF/UHF cross band repeaters that are also capable of being digipeaters. This will greatly enhance our abilities should there be a failure of the usual repeaters that we now rely on. Expect to see these kits being used in upcoming exercises as we test and train on their use. Our thanks to both Multnomah County Emergency Management and Portland Bureau of Emergency Management for their help and support in obtaining this grant!