I would like to thank the following for joining me, KD0CGN, at the Linn Co EOC today!
K0ECW, W0GSK, WA0PCC, K9PYR, N0YWB, KF9MT, NM5PB, KA0IES, WA0PCD, KC9HGP
Great turn out!
We have a website! http://www.eiedn.org – Please visit it. Maybe read the content I have up and let me know what I need to update. I know the site is pretty stale and blank looking but I haven’t had time to clone myself so I could work on it. I do have photo galleries up from events we’ve had and where I and other snagged pictures and shared with me. I also have articles up as blog posts. Rickie I stole your article from Bandspread on the RF Node install at EOC and added it to the site, lol. Actually this email will probably become an article too.
Old Business –
- Continue Tower plans for the AREDN install at the Morse Tower. Bob, N0YWB, has gotten 85-90% of the hardware programmed and planned out. Waiting on tower maintenance so we can join them and deploy our equipment the same day. Hope to have this done in June but my roll over into July.
- Continue planning / acquiring hardware for the Mercy Tower – I, KD0CGN, need to get hardware rounded up and get a date figured out. Plan to have this done by end of July so that we can test the RF link to EOC for Especially For You event in Oct.
- Pigman 2025 – I, KD0CGN, had a camera up on the run course back to Net Control. This event is at Pleasant Creek with is a park to is in a hole, with holes inside itself. So getting Line of Sight is incredibly difficult. Need 80 foot towers at 2 or 3 locations to really be able to get the whole course on the network – we will get there eventually!
- Linn Co EMA/EOC FIRST RF NODE! – We did get the Powerbeam horn kind of pointed towards Mercy. Needs adjusting. The omni on top hates me, KD0CGN. Looks like a bad network cable so we need to plan a day to swap that out as it looks to be a full tower tilt over to get back up there.
Next ARES / Health & Well-being Comms event is the Lake Macbride trail run. Watch for information from Dave, WA0PCC, for this event!
New business / meat & potatoes of the day:
We were able to build a mesh network inside the EOC today and get DX Logger communicating over it! This was a test to make sure we could provide the back bone computer network for Field Day here in Cedar Rapids.
Moving ahead:
Morse Tower install date pending
Mercy Tower install date pending
Field Day – June 27th – 29th – Corner of C Ave and Collins Rd. I, KD0CGN, plan to be out Friday night to help with some setup. Not sure how much of the AREDN gear we’ll deploy then but plan to be back in the morning to get everything finalized before they start calling CQ.
Lake Macbride trail run – super hard to deploy AREDN since this is around the lake and it is covered in trees but we might start looking at something.
Trail run at Pleasant Creek in September. Again its around the lake so hard to do a mesh with the tree coverage unless we can get an 80 foot tower out at the beach, then we could get a couple nodes working if this ISP Designer is working right.
Especially For You 5k is October 5th. We’ll deploy for this event. Hope to weasel my way up to the video guy and get our cameras on the big screens before the race starts so the crowd of 16,000 plus people can see that we’re out there watching them. keeping them safe.
There has been interest in the Linn Co AREDN / EIEDN team venture West and present AREDN to the Des Moines area clubs. I am trying to narrow down a date and time to see whom all would like to make the journey.
Final thought, someone please make the smoke go away so we can see some meteors tonight!
Stay tuned. A lot to come and some of it may come fast!
Kraig A. Wilford
KD0CGN – Linn County, IA Assistant Emergency Coordinator, AREDN “Leader”
kraigawilford@gmail.com