Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy Holidays to All from the VoIP Hurricane Net Management Team!
Hello to all..
On behalf of the VoIP Hurricane Net Management Team, we would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy Holidays to all. Thanks to all of you for your support of the VoIP Hurricane Net during 2014.
The 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season was slightly more active then 2013 but was still a relatively quiet year for the VoIP Hurricane Net. There were 4 formal net activations. The first two activations were for Hurricane Arthur and its impact over Eastern North Carolina and Arthur’s impacts as a strong tropical storm over Eastern Canada working with both the National Hurricane Center in Miami, FL and the Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth Nova Scotia Canada. The other two formal net activations were for Hurricane Gonzalo where the first activation was for the Caribbean islands including Anguilla, St Barts, St Maarten, St Kitts and other islands and the second activation was for Bermuda which took a direct hit as Gonzalo impacted Bermuda as a landfalling major hurricane. Numerous reports from both Amateur Radio and other sources specifically from the stomcarib.com storm blogging site and personal weather stations from weather underground helped to give hurricane specialists at the National Hurricane Center an understanding of conditions on the ground during these tropical systems impacts over their respective areas. Over the non-hurricane season months of December-May, training topics were given over the VoIP Hurricane Prep Net during the February-April 2014 net sessions and were well received by net participants. Recordings of these presentations along with their Powerpoint presentations can be found on the voipwx.net web site. During the weekly VoIP Hurricane Prep Net, a ‘question of the week’ was instituted for most weekly nets to gather more info and to have more of our net participants think of weather and hurricane spotting and weather/disaster preparedness.
Hello to all..
On behalf of the VoIP Hurricane Net Management Team, we would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy Holidays to all. Thanks to all of you for your support of the VoIP Hurricane Net during 2014.
The 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season was slightly more active then 2013 but was still a relatively quiet year for the VoIP Hurricane Net. There were 4 formal net activations. The first two activations were for Hurricane Arthur and its impact over Eastern North Carolina and Arthur’s impacts as a strong tropical storm over Eastern Canada working with both the National Hurricane Center in Miami, FL and the Canadian Hurricane Centre in Dartmouth Nova Scotia Canada. The other two formal net activations were for Hurricane Gonzalo where the first activation was for the Caribbean islands including Anguilla, St Barts, St Maarten, St Kitts and other islands and the second activation was for Bermuda which took a direct hit as Gonzalo impacted Bermuda as a landfalling major hurricane. Numerous reports from both Amateur Radio and other sources specifically from the stomcarib.com storm blogging site and personal weather stations from weather underground helped to give hurricane specialists at the National Hurricane Center an understanding of conditions on the ground during these tropical systems impacts over their respective areas. Over the non-hurricane season months of December-May, training topics were given over the VoIP Hurricane Prep Net during the February-April 2014 net sessions and were well received by net participants. Recordings of these presentations along with their Powerpoint presentations can be found on the voipwx.net web site. During the weekly VoIP Hurricane Prep Net, a ‘question of the week’ was instituted for most weekly nets to gather more info and to have more of our net participants think of weather and hurricane spotting and weather/disaster preparedness.
As occurs yearly, we did support WX4NHC, the Amateur Radio Station at the National Hurricane Center with the WX4NHC Communications Test at the start of the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season. As our main client, we appreciate WX4NHC’s support of our net and thank WX4NHC Coordinators, Julio Ripoll-WD4R and John McHugh-K4AG for their support. They have been an incredible partner with the VoIP Hurricane Net dating back to the net’s inception in the 2003-2004 timeframe. We also had another successful SKYWARN Recognition Day event on the home of the VoIP Hurricane Net, Echolink conference: *WX-TALK* Node: 7203/IRLP 9219. Many NWS offices rotated on the system making contacts with Amateur Radio Operators and SKYWARN Spotters from around the country thanking them for their support as well as making contact with different NWS offices around the country.
We also were proud to participate with the Crescent City Amateur Radio Group and N5OZG-Joe Glorioso in a Louisiana Hurricane Exercise in September 2014. They did an excellent job and we were proud of participating in their state drill. It was the first time for the VoIP Hurricane Net to participate in a state’s hurricane exercise since hurricane exercises held in Massachusetts in the mid to late 2000s.
As we move into next year, we will again have a presence at the 2015 National Hurricane Conference which will be in Austin, Texas. We will look at doing training presentations particularly on the non-hurricane season months in 2015 and continue the question of the week format for the weekly nets and possibly do a few training sessions during the weekly nets that we have during the 2015 Atlantic Hurricane Season. We will also look at boosting more stations and contacts within the affected areas of hurricanes to provide critical surface reports to WX4NHC.
We will also update and put out NCO training for the 2015 Atlantic Hurricane Season. We would like to ask folks that might be interested to be a net oontrol for the weekly/monthly VoIP Hurricane Prep Net ad for net activations to please contact me directly as a reply to this email or at kd1cy@voipwx.net
We look forward to working with everyone again in 2015. Our first regular net of 2015 will be Saturday January 3rd, 2015 at 8 PM ET/7 PM CT/6 PM MT/5 PM PT which also equates to 0100 UTC Sunday. The net will meet monthly through May and then become weekly during the Atlantic Hurricane Season. We again wish all of our reporting stations, net controls and supporting stations that listen to the VoIP Hurricane Net a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and a Happy Holiday season!
73,Rob-KD1CY.
Director of Operations for the VoIP Hurricane Net