Update on SEOC station

(Some of this was posted on Facebook, but not everyone is on FB, and there are some details at the end that weren't in the FB post).

 

Pretty interesting (and tiring) day at the SEOC Saturday. A group of us were there to install the HF antennas. It was a LOT slower than expected. It took us some time to locate the color codes for the feedlines coming in from outside. We had previously dragged cables inside the Auxcomm room, but the furniture turned out to be not what was expected, so about half those cables still need to be dragged somewhere else.

But the outside cables were an experience. There are 40 cables coming into the building, 13 of which are ours. For some reason the contractors decided to use only two colors of tape on the 23 feedlines from the big tower. So, were there 14 pieces of white tape on that cable or only 13?

Just a few of the incoming cables

We had not previously located the surge protectors for the control cables for the tuners, so we had to tear up even more floor. Of course, that made every step inside something of a challenge.

Things were even worse outside. There was a couple inches of mud over frozen mud, so half the time when you picked up your foot your boot would stay put. The other half of the time you would slide on the frozen ground lubricated by quicksand, so a few times one or another of us would be unable to avoid getting horizontal. Not much fun in that mud, but at least it was soft.

Inside not a lot better. There is a LOT of equipment, most of it not where it belongs. A lot of things I didn't recognize, and things I expected to find I didn't. But we got plenty of exercise carrying heavy stuff around. Do you have any idea what a 50 amp Astron weighs? Or an 87A? There is so much stuff in the room a lot of things we couldn’t find until after we needed them. We kind of cobbled up end insulators, and Bob found a center insulator, but it turns out there was a box of insulators, baluns, pulleys, other antenna stuff hidden under boxes of power cables.

In the end we only got a single antenna up, and we're not all that happy with that one. But we have something for Wednesday, anyway.

A big thanks to WD8BCS, KE8ACA, KC8LTL, and especially K8RDN for some really hard work under very suboptimal conditions. Still plenty of work to do, but I think it is going to have to wait until it gets drier, or colder.

So, remaining work to be done:

• Move the MARS and CAP feedlines across the room
• Move the VHF/UHF feedlines down one slot
• Get holes drilled in the blue workspaces
• Finish moving the equipment to the proper slots
• Locate CAP and Trbo radios
• N connector on CAP feedline under floor
• Might need connectors both ends of Trbo feedline
• Get Fred or Jeff to program Trbo radio
• Arrange some sort of mount for VHF heads
• Set up packet station
• What is the deal with the tuners?
• Get correct wire antennas in place once the ground is firm
• Set up Pactor station. May want to chat with WB2FTX on the best way to set up the software.
• get power to the digital position
• Build or acquire cabinets or shelves for storage

Lots of work to do, a few areas of concern:

• Not real sure what power supplies are what, and if we have enough.  Seems like there is a bunch but it gets skinny when you start assigning them
• The tuners appear to be only for long wires.  Not clear that they will work for the G5RV antennas.  We do have some 4:1 baluns that might work OK for CW (the radio has a built in tuner), but for Pactor that will limit us for the time being (will have to use a manual tuner so we won't be frequency agile unattended).
• We need to upgrade the tuner on the loop so we can use the Alpha.
• We probably need some lessons on the Alpha
• We definitely need some lessons on the MotoTrbo

 In addition to this, the MARS and CAP stations are pretty much untouched.  There is a CAP VHF antenna and feedline, and feedlines and towers for MARS, but not much else has been done.

2015 Overview

Sorry this is so long in coming.  But probably worthwhile to review 2015.

First, and most importantly, Michigan ARES members reported over 100,000 volunteer hours in 2015, with a volunteer value of almost $2MM.  Emergency Coordinators reported 202 planned incidents (walks, runs, etc.) and 119 unplanned.  Included in the unplanned were 41 SKYWARN activations, 28 Search and Rescue outings, 6 power outage and 5 fire responses.

Hours contributed in direct emergency response have fallen slowly over the past few years, but that has more than been made up for in drills, exercises and other preparedness work.

In terms of statewide exercises and preparedness, in 2015 we participated in the statewide tornado drill in April, the Northern Exposure exercise in June, an improvised nuclear device seminar also in June, a radiological awareness workshop in August, an exercise involving the alternate SEOC in September, the D.C. Cook nuclear plant series of exercises in September and October, and the annual Training and Exercise Planning Workshop (T&EPW) in November.

Last year our annual Simulated Emergency Test was built around a zombie apocalypse.  Participants made heavy use of NBEMS and some use of D-Star.  Counties sent their ICS-205 forms to the state reflecting the disruption to communications caused by a zombie outbreak, and were reminded of the importance of keeping their 217A up to date, and of the utility of the 201 and 202 when things go south.




In 2015 the SEC took the FEMA Auxcomm class, and co-authored an updated Amateur Radio Emergency Service manual.  The state's Interoperable Communications Board named the SEC and Marc Breckenridge, the EMC for Washtenaw County, as co-chairs of an Auxcomm working group.


One of the more fun bits as we headed toward the new year was wrapping up construction of a new state EOC.  The ARES/RACES station will feature a full size 160 meter loop for phone, G5RVs for CW and Pactor, and a 150 foot tower housing our VHF and UHF antennas.


All in all, a pretty good year last year.

How'd He Do That?

A number of folks have asked about the rendering I did of the proposed antenna farm at the new SEOC.  I'm not an artist, I can't draw worth a darn.  The images were produced using constructive solid geometry - that is, the images are the result of a bunch of equations.

The way this works is simple, at least in principle.  You write a bunch of expressions describing a bunch of objects, and the computer figures out what it will look like.  Skilled artists can make breathtaking images, but for a tecchie like me, it can be very helpful to try to visualize something.

The first time I realized this was back in the 90's, and it really hit home when Chip Cohen, (then NI1R) began talking about his patented fractal quad yagi (FQY) antenna.  His claims were fantastic, but people just couldn't understand it.  Try as he might to explain it,  he kept getting accused of trying to hide what he was actually doing.

I made a tracing for myself to try to understand it, and sent some images to Chip, which he used in an article in Monitoring Times.  That led the magazine to commission me to do their cover artwork, which remains my only published artwork.  These images are all created with POV-Ray, a rather old, open-source program, but one capable of amazing results.

While creating a scene like this was can be tedious, it really isn't all that hard.  In the antenna case, I began by modeling an aluminum tube, 1 inch in diameter and 12 inches long, by writing

 cylinder { <0,0,0>,<0,1,0>,1/24 texture {Aluminum} }.


(I used units of feet, so a 1" diameter tube has a radius of 1/24 of a foot).


I then arranged four of these in a square

One foot of tower

and put quarter inch tubes diagonally across each edge.

This gave me one foot of tower.  OK, perhaps it will be a triangular tower, it probably will be a little different size, in fact, we haven't specified the tower as it has to comply with FEMA standards.  It probably won't be your typical ham tower.

5 feet

I had towers of 20, 30, 35 and 125 feet, so I combined the one-foot sections into five-foot sections, which I could then combine into the appropriate heights.



The sky is a standard "texture", and while I probably could have used a more aesthetic sky, the first one I tried looked OK so I just stuck with it.

  sky_sphere { S_Cloud1 }


The General Office Building (GOB) is in the background and mostly obscured, so I simply modeled that as boxes.

  #declare GOB1 = object { box { <-95,0,0>,<95,35,2*95>  texture { Brick } } }
  #declare GOB2 = object { box { <-34.34,0,0><34.34,50,148> texture { Brick } } }
  object { GOB1 translate <-39,0,333> }
  object { GOB2 translate <-39-34.34,0,422> }

 
I had intended to get fancy with the "Brick" texture, but I ended up with simply a light brick colored pigment, and for the GOB, probably quite a bit different than reality.

One wall

For the SEOC itself, since many of the walls are at odd angles, each wall was modeled as a box, and rotated into position.  Since the measurements were taken off a relatively small drawing, the odds are they aren't very accurate, but they can at least give a feel.  I again used the "Brick" texture because I have no idea what sort of texture will be used on the new building.







Finally, oversized cylinders were used for the wires.  Modeling drooping wires is possible, but a pain in the neck, and copper colored wires of a realistic size would be invisible, especially in the movie, so I used 1.2" diameter black cylinders.

Adding a few trees (from an example macro that produces pretty ugly trees), a little fog to make some things appear a little less prominent, and we have something that can give us a feel for the antenna farm.  I have to admit to being terminally lazy, and even though someone else did the hard work of figuring out how to model a tree, I wasn't about to write a line for every tree.  So, I wrote a C program to generate code for 800 trees in four rows, two on each side, of randomly varying heights and distances.

For the movie, 99 frames were made of the same scene, moving the camera between each frame.  The individual frames were combined with ImageMagick.

Hams in Important Places

A few months ago, K8RDN, KA8DDQ and I sat down with the architects for the new SEOC to talk about antennas.  For VHF/UHF antennas it is pretty simple; put up as tall a tower as we can manage and stick the antennas on that.

For HF it's a little messier.  We currently run CW and SSB stations simultaneously, and want to add a Pactor station.  Since we are interested in in-state, beams and huge height aren't useful -- we want wire antennas fairly close to the ground.

We decided on a loop (which has worked well for us) and two G5RVs.  Add to that the inverted Vee for MARS and you have quite a pile of towers.  We were sure to specify power and weatherproof boxes at the bases of the towers to support remote antenna tuners.

WB8RCR rendering

What we (I) didn't consider is that running the feedline from a tower at the end to the center of the G5 could get a little messy.  I thought of that later, but figured we could cobble something together.

When the drawings arrived from the architects, there was a 6 foot riser with a weatherhead specified at the center of each G5.  Obviously at least one of the architects was a ham.