Training & Certification News

by Eli W7ELI on 2015-06-22

The June meeting will be presented by Adam. I’ll let him tell you about it:

The training topic for June is going to be a little different. We’ll be talking about how to program the memories of your radios with a computer. We’re also going to quickly break into a programming party for those of you who would like to get your radios programmed with the latest ARES frequency template.

As you are aware, setting up the memories in your radio via your computer is so much easier and faster than manual entry, especially if you have several hundred memories to set up. Programming via computer also makes it harder to make mistakes, since the program is watching that you don’t enter crazy stupid things – like trying to set a frequency of 100,000 GHz for example.

Programming via computer also makes it more likely all the ARES members have similar setups. If there’s a strong culture of programming in the unit, leadership can just start to send out template file updates for events, drills and incidents that use different frequencies than we have in our “standard,” eliminating the need for you to spend an hour the morning of the event trying to get the frequencies set up, or showing up without the frequencies set up at all and looking around for people to program your radio for you. At the meeting, we’ll be talking about the programs you can use to program your radio, systems to organize and manage your frequency templates, factory vs RT vs Ebay cables, and similar topics.

If you bring your radio and your programming cable, there will be stations available to get your radio updated with the current template at the meeting. If you don’t have a programming cable for your radio, someone might have one that you can borrow to get your radio flashed at the meeting. But you should get a cable, if you don’t have one, as soon as you can.

If you are an old hand at programming your radio, we’d love your help for the meeting! Bring your laptop and cables and help us program radios! If you’re interested, drop kf7ljh [at] arrl [dot] net a note and we can talk that through.

Adam KF7LJH

We now have 56 ARRO certified, 15 Net Control certified, and 13 HF certified members.

All members should have received the revised training schedule. The Traffic Handling training has been rescheduled for the August meeting and the NTS Traffic Drill From Home has been moved from June 20 to September 12.

I’m excited about the Radio Camp Out August 15-16. We’ll play with our HF and 2 meter go kits, HTs, and the trailer. Robert and Adam will be training on HF and signing HF certification check sheets for those who want their HF certification. Or just come and hang out in the woods with us for the day or overnight.

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