Author: dick

Florence, redux

Well, Florence has come and has gone, even though we’re still experiencing rain and thunderstorms from the system . There wasn’t much impact here, where I live. The forecasts were dire and uncertain, but at my QTH we ended up with not much rain and not much wind. In some lower-lying parts of the area, there was flooding and trees down. Lots of businesses were closed … MacDonalds and Wendys were the two I noticed … in anticipation of much more severe weather that really never came to pass. My daughter, who is practice teaching in the Chesapeake school system, had an unscheduled week off when they decided to close the schools as a precautionary measure.

However, a glance to our south … and not that far south … shows what it could have been like. The Carolinas were, and still are, devastated. Destruction, chaos, roads impassible or just gone … those people need our prayers and our aid. It will be a long time before things get back to normal there.

There have been some comments about how we went through all this expensive preparation for nothing. My answer is look to out south … to what could have been. Predicting the weather is not an exact science and it’s better to be ready than to be caught unprepared. We were as ready as we could be, and that’s OK with me.

73 de Dick N4BC

Florence update

It looks like we may have dodged the bullet here in the Virginia Peninsula area. We still can expect tidal flooding and wind and rain, but nothing like what had been forecast as a possible scenario. Unfortunately, that’ll be visited on our friends to the south. More like a normal (?) rain/wind event for us. Judging by what they’re predicting now, some of our bad winter storms have been worse.

It’s never a bad idea to prepare for the worst and hope for the best, though. If you don’t get ready and things go sour, you’re stuck with what you’ve got. I did all the “due diligence” … food, water, batteries, gas, and so forth. I always try to go a bit beyond the minimums, since I’m not usually at home with the family during these events, but at work looking after radio systems. I hate to not be there with them, but it’s one of the drawbacks of the job.

73 de Dick N4BC

40 Meters

Wow! The little chart you see everywhere that shows band conditions and solar activity says everything is “poor”, but you wouldn’t know it on forty meters. I just worked W9IMS, a commemorative station at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway … he gave me a 59 and he was an indicated 59+20 on the S-meter. Lots of other stations, mostly up and down the east coast with booming signals … CW, SSB, whatever! Just goes to show you, don’t believe everything you read! Get on and see for yourself.

Wow is right!

Still on a hurricane watch here in coastal Virginia. Still uncertain landfall for Florence, but not looking real great. I think we’re in for a wild ride no matter where it hits. I’m charging batteries and getting things together.

73 de Dick N4BC (Battening down the hatches)

Hamfest and Weather

Saturday was the Virginia Beach Hamfest, and I made the annual trek to the Convention Center. The crowd was smallish, and there were a few vendors, and several tailgaters at inside tables. I ran into a lot of friends and acquaintances, and generally had a good time.

I attended the Mesh Networking talk (two hours) and found it interesting and informative. They talked about the implementation in Hampton and some of the issues with installation and operation. Good forum and well worth the time spent.

This past weekend, we had a pretty strong storm event … lots of thunder and lightning and several inches of rain, causing a lot of flooding. We’re under the gun for a hurricane watch as well … all waiting to see just what hurricane Florence is going to do. The storm has the potential to tear us up and we’ll surely get flooding and rain, but just how bad it will be remains to be seen. I’m charging everything up, just in case.

I’ve already been informed that I’ll be on call for the duration of the storm. When you’re involved with public safety communications, your time is not your own. My family doesn’t appreciate that philosophy, but you “gotta do what you gotta do”.

So we’re doing pre-storm checks at work, and just waiting for the forecast to become more refined. We should know more by mid-week.

73 de Dick N4BC