16 April 09

Amateur Radio for the Campus

Today we had the first face-to-face meeting of the new UC Davis Amateur Radio Communications team. Several years ago, in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, the campus put out a call for ideas for emergency preparedness and one of the local hams thought it would be a good idea to establish an amateur radio network for the campus. After much explanation to the powers that be, many of whom who had never heard of amateur radio, this idea was endorsed and several hams started working with the campus Emergency Operations Center to establish this team. This past December, the group started holding weekly on-the-air nets (every Monday at 12:30 PM) and since that time our net has grown to well over twenty participants.

After work today we got to meet each other in person and tour the Emergency Operations Center, which is where the group’s equipment is set up. There is a dedicated room for the amateur radio operations, and the equipment includes a tall antenna on the roof, a dual-band base station, a digital scanner, and soon a repeater. It’s great to see both commitment from the university in supporting this effort and a lot of interest and participation from the hams on campus.

In other radio news, the transmitter section of the SW-40+ that I’ve been building has decided to wake up after weeks of troubleshooting. It’s time to get the rig on the air!

Posted by at 10:41 PM in Radio | Link |

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