Amateur (Ham) Radio BS and Callsign Thread!

I say yes provided your company will pay if you volunteer regardless if they are a sponsor. This is a way of the company encouraging more volunteering.

 

Don't sweat it. Take the pay.

 

Agree.

 

The party you are volunteering for isn't paying you. Your company is. I think it's grey but personally I see no moral issue with it. Especially since the group you're providing the service for isn't the paying party

 

That's where my thought process was going as well. Thanks.

 

No problem. Hope the ride goes well. You'll have to share your experience on here as well and let us know how it goes !

 

The event happened last Sunday, which turned out to be a beautiful day to be outside. That was both a blessing and a cause for sunburned ankles later. I had anticipated a sunny day and covered up my upper half well enough but went with shorts and tennis shoes without sunblock. Lesson learned there.

The while event had over 2,000 riders and a crew of about 95 ham radio operators. This is an annual event to raise money for multiple sclerosis research (I believe) and at some point became largely sponsored by British Petroleum (the "bp" in bpms150). Information for volunteer hams is found at www.bpms150hams.org.

The rider participants bike about 150 miles over a period of two days, and volunteers may help out on one or both days. Because I heard about this at my ham club meeting this year it was my first year with this event and they were only seeking Sunday volunteers. Prior to this event I had worked a charity walk and run up at Point Defiance Park in Washington State, making this my second event in about a 20-year time span.

The group I worked with had four hams directing (vehicle and bike) traffic at the last pit area before the finish line. Every one of us was doing this as a first-year volunteer which was a clue that this post wasn't the most desired option. The team leader for our group is a leader for the local ARES organization as well as both of the other two hams. They even joked that I was a "scab" worker, but declined when I offered to leave (jokingly of course).

My setup included the truck mounted Kenwood TM-D710 and a Kenwood TH-6F handheld tri-band radio. I decided to cross-band repeat the mobile at high watt power and run the HT on extra low power. Using this configuration made it so the recharged stock battery used about 60% (my guess as the battery indicator shows 1/4 charge indicators). I also periodically idled the truck engine to keep the factory stock battery happy. A 100W solar panel was actually in my online shopping cart recently with a solar charge controller and extension cables, but then I looked up the consumption rate of leaving the truck idling and saw it was only about 0.3 gal/hour. It turned out that we could park right next to where we had to stand so I felt good about leaving it running about 1/3 of the time, which was from about 9 am until 3:30 pm. The other hams relied solely on HT power with upgraded antennas or an HT connected to a 5db gain ladder line antenna run up to about 30 feet (his claim on the gain).

Events of note were:
- A driver tried to follow official vehicles into our area (which was marked as being for even vehicles only), refused to leave when I asked him to, spoke poor English, and the car smelled fairly strongly of alcohol. I radioed to net control requesting a law enforcement response but by the time net control understood the situation my fellow hams had talked him into driving up the road to speak with some off duty Sheriff Deputies working traffic only 300 yards from us. I later saw that car turn around and drive out of the area. I wish we had been on the same page as to our actions there.
- A bike rider saw one of the other hams trying to slow other riders down behind her and thought she needed to make an emergency stop right where there were a couple of manhole covers in the street. She went down in the street and sustained some injuries from the fall. I was up the road at the time and did not witness any of it personally but did hear the medical call go out. A frustrating part of that situation was our team leader did not provide net control with any triage information as we had been instructed to do in the pre-event training material, and I knew he wasn't but was too far away to do anything about that.
- A fellow volunteer started feeling light-headed and dizzy near the end of the event when it had warmed up to the mid-80s. I was the ham that made initial contact with her and relayed the information to net control, yet about 30 seconds later another ham from her group (on the same net) made a second call for the same situation. Okay, were they not paying attention? Maybe they were away from their radio or switched off (another no-no). She did get medical help of course.
- From about halfway through the event to the end our team leader started to take a back seat or disappear entirely. One of my pet peeves is a leader not giving directions so I just started suggesting how we should do things and the other two went along with it.

In the end, we were all just volunteers so they got what they paid for, perhaps. It actually went okay in my opinion. Not as well as my other volunteering experience but this event was about 20 times the size (just a wild guess).

I did not end up taking advantage of my company's offer to pay for volunteering hours, although about 2/3 of the radio calls I made were on commerce handheld radios (provided at the site).

The included picture shows a couple of bike riders with the staging area in the background (and myself foreground).

 

@SigBoy now you can be lead next year!

Nice write up. Hope you kept a personal log as well so that way if you ended up doing it again next year, you can bring up these topics in advanced to refine the event day practices.


May the aloe be kind to you!

 

Nice write up, sounds like a good time. I ran my first event last year and something you didn't mention that I had thought about was an easy up canopy. It was quite nice to have in the new england heat. Just don't be an idiot and bring a tarp with metal reinforcing, you aren't going to hear anything on the radios.

 

Fortunate for us, the venue provided a canopy for those of us standing off-road. Not so much for those of us in the road.

 

Great info, I am tempted to volunteer for events like this as well but kinda assumed they would be less than on top of it.
I have 80 watt panels and a 35ah agm battery I use to power my FTM400 on cross band so I’m ready to go, but am afraid to be part of a group who makes things worse for the event lol.

Guess I should be more positive and go for it.

 

The net control operators were the ones that had everything down and made it run well. I think those are the more experienced hams who let the new people deal with the more physical roles out in the field. Not saying that net control is a bunch of lazy or older people, just that they have the experience to know what the good jobs are. I enjoyed the experience anyway.

 

Question mark, I am order a ftm-400 in the next day or so, and wondering about what would be a good external speaker to go with it? Would the recommended yaesu be the best? Or is there something else you guys would recommend? My truck isn't exactly quiet at highway speeds.
Also wondering if there is a way to split audio going to my car radio to prioritize the yaesu over music. My aux cord is pretty well hardwired, so it can just stay connected

 

I've looked into running the radio through the...radio using the aux wires and there is no way to prioritize it, you are either listening to music or the radio. I'm not aware of a audio plug "combiner" that will turn one off when it gets a signal from something else, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

In my experience, the type of speaker doesn't matter too much, be the placement of the speaker is going to get you better audio. I found a small 8 ohm speaker on digikey and shoved it up in the headliner, works awesome, even at highway speeds in the rain. It probably cost me about $6.

 

The one I rock.

https://www.mtcradio.com/mfj-281-cleartone-external-speaker/

 

I ran an aux cable from the 400 into my 2016 radio and it’s kinda cool. A band comes out one side and B the the other side of the truck speakers. The downside is at least in my experience, was that the speakers didn’t sound great on less than perfect signals. Lots of pops and clicks that sounded like I was damaging the speakers. Not saying they were, but it’s distracting.

If you do get an external speaker make sure it’s 8ohm and also that you use the included plug stereo/mono adapter that comes in the yaesu box as applicable.

 

Just upgraded last week to this same speaker. Much better than the crap I had gotten from a truck stop. Much better tone and understandability in speech with it.

 

So, yeah, tucking a speaker in the headliner wouldn't exactly work well, cuz I don't have a headliner in right now... But you guys do have me sold on the cleartone, and it's available for HRO, which is where I am going to order the ftm-400 from. Thank you guys for the input.

 

Dayton hamvention is on 2 weeks if you can wait

 

Pretty sure they have the hamvention prices going on now, and even then, would rather get it at the $409 price instead of waiting for it to possibly go back up before I can order it.