"William" wrote ...

Wow. Warms the heart to see such humanity on the group.


Apparently you've never been on the end of a personal attack from Leonard.
I have. He deserves a lot harsher language than I have ever sent his way.

It would certainly be
an improvement over what we've seen here from you in the past.

Arn, ever see what Steve posts?

Sure. They are usually in response to a first strike from Leonard. What's
your point?

BTW, we put our Amateur Radio gear on-line for the first time in the
Mobile
Incident Command Center the other day.

But 9/11 was more than 2.5 years ago.


We've had plenty of comms ability since then, but put the gear in the MICP
as a means of improvement. Improvement of comms systems is a good thing,
right William?

First contact was via CW with a
station in Iowa.

Was it Iowa that you needed to contact? I'm trying to think what an
East Coast military installation might need with Iowa? Looking for
obsolete Collins parts?

Conditions for SSB were just not up to par.

For a contact with Iowa? Did you try a band higher? Did you try a
band lower? Again, what was the reason Iowa was needed for a contact?


We tested the gear on ALL bands (and both modes). And Iowa was the place we
happened to contact first. If I need to contact FEMA via HF in another
state (including IOWA) I think I have proven that it can be done by this
test. And that, after all, was the purpose to begin with.

We just love
having all those tools in our communications kit.

Wow. Me too.

We also tested our state of the art sat-phone/VTCs and wireless VOIP
network. They worked flawlessly -- what wonderful pieces of gear. We
are
now completely wireless (including phone lines) so we can go wherever
needed.

So you really didn't need to contact Iowa with amateur radio. I was
wondering about that.

Sure we did. The Ham gear is for redundancy. That's why we have it. A
test of it's HF capability was important. Test complete, test successful.

21st Century comms at its best -- which means a mixture of the old
and new together to give us the strongest redundancy possible.

Strong redundancy equals GAO audits. They don't like redundancy even
if it means survivability. They'd rather have the money spent on food
stamps and WIC.


Strong redundancy equals uninterrupted communications in an emergency. The
GAO cares not as long as we spend the money appropriately. Since the
purchases were pre-approved, I guess we already did that.

Arnie, its always great to read one of you posts. Thanks for stopping
in.

And you too William.

Arnie -