Historically, the city EOC has been located at Fire Station #1 in downtown Hillsboro. Like many such stations, the equipment and operators were squeezed into a corner of a space used for various other things. Despite this, we provided Voice, Packet, and D-STAR service for the station. In December of 2009, the city EOC and Emergency Manager relocated to the Ronler Acres fire station and allocated a large space in the new facility to the amateur radio station. The result is much improved operating conditions, opportunity for more equipment, and an overall increased level of service provided to the city. |
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K7HIO will be participating in the ACES ACT 2 exercise. Details on the participation from Hillsboro, as well as other stations, is posted on the ACES site. Event Time:
2010-07-10 09:00 - 13:00
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On June 3, 2010 the City of Hillsboro performed a full power-down test at the Ronler site. This gave us an opportunity to see the automatic generator transfer switch in action, as well as test our own backup power capabilities. The test was true to life, in that the facilities person turned off the main power at the disconnect switch, simulating an immediate total power loss. Within seconds, we received notification of the power outage via pager:
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Please visit the web site at least every 2-3 weeks. Things are updated and added all the time. Our monthly meeting is the 4th Monday of each month at Ronler Fire Station and City of Hillsboro EOC. 6:00 PM on the 26th. Event Time:
2010-04-26 18:00 - 20:00
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K7HIO participated in the ACES ACT 1 drill today. The full set of pictures are available in the gallery. We hit almost all of our objectives and learned a lot about operating at the new station.
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Hillsboro will be participating in the ACES ACT 1 drill. More information on the overall drill is available on the ACES site. See below for the complete Hillsboro plan. Our goal is to demonstrate the use of the following technologies: Event Time:
2010-04-03 09:00 - 13:00
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It's no secret that K7HIO has been ahead of the rest of the area in using low-speed D-STAR for quite some time now. Since 2008, we have been transferring files and messages around the county using D-RATS with much success. The hi-speed D-STAR has taken longer to get into place because of the cost of the equipment, lack of antennas, and short coax runs. Six months ago (almost to the day), KK7DS put the county's hi-speed data repeater module up in our cabinet on top of the Synopsys building in Hillsboro. Aside from a little bit of testing a few days later, it has been dormant...until now. |
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Now that all the pagers are behaving and we've got the transmitter hardware mostly set, we had two questions to answer:
The first one is mostly out of our control, we just need to see if having the transmitter at a low-level site is good enough to cover the people we're interested in notifying. |
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On Saturday, a small group of us installed our first new antenna since relocating to Ronler Acres Fire Station. We attached a Comet GP-98 to the strut on the side of the building. K7JDF was staged on top of the roof and K7TAY was on the ladder, while KK7DS watched from down below. |
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All of the pagers we're using are "previously loved", which means that some of them are a little flaky when being programmed. The programming cable is designed with two tall spring-loaded pins that need to enter holes on the pack of the pager to hit the programming contacts inside. Some of the pagers seem to have no problem with this, with others the pins only occasionally make proper contact. When this happens, we see the following message from the programming software: |
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