January 2025 Yers Trooly
N7LGN—Post 113AmateurRadio Club By: Yers Trooly
Greetings,
Winter Field Day provided us with many great lessons. Yers Trooly had to learn them the hard way. First, checking and ensuring all your stuff works before you go remote might be a good idea. In my case, I forgot to test to see if I could transmit a signal remotely…surprise…I couldn’t. Sigh! I found out we weren’t the only ones with gremlins. At least two other groups had similar issues. However, we had a great time at David and Annette's home for the event. The food was excellent, and so was the comradeship. Thus, Winter Field Day 2025 was a success!
Emergency preparedness is again in the news, especially with recent disasters in California and the Southern states. It has been reported that amateur radio operators provided needed communications for emergency events. The communications provided were centered around community support, as we discussed before. Our group can support community communications and be integral to the community emergency recovery process.
As some of you know, we formed a Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) in our American Legion Post five years ago. Our national American Legion organization has a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with FEMA and encourages Posts to participate in CERT.
In the United States, CERT is:
• an implementation of FEMA's National CERT Program, administered by a local sponsoring agency, which provides a standardized training and implementation framework to community members;
• an organization of volunteer emergency workers who have received specific training in basic disaster response skills and agree to supplement existing emergency responders during a major disaster.
In light of recent events, it might not be a bad idea to reinvigorate our group. Our team’s numbers are decreasing with people moving away, and we should conduct training to remain viable in our community. Ada County is our certifying organization, and if we can get at least eight people to volunteer to be members, we can get the training and flesh out our group.
The training typically consists of two days of classroom instruction in the evening and one day of practical training, usually on a Saturday. Please note that you do not need a radio license to be a CERT team member. If you want to join our group and receive the training, please contact me at w7boi@n7lgn.com or (208) 870-7928.
