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Spring 2003 Issue |
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Banner of the Nacogdoches Amateur Radio Club at the site of net control
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FM The Eyes of Texas
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I can’t think of very many ways to apply the word “fortunate” to the Columbia shuttle disaster last February. One that comes to mind, though, is that nobody on the ground was killed or injured when debris rained down on east Texas. That’s because most of the debris fell early on a cold Saturday morning in rural country. Much of it was concentrated in Nacogdoches and San Augustine counties, which are located about 150 miles southeast of Dallas. If the event had occurred a few hours later, playgrounds and parking lots would have been a lot busier. If the event had occurred a few minutes earlier, the shuttle fragments could have hit near the Dallas/Forth Worth area, with millions more people as potential targets The rural nature of east Texas also had a downside in this tragedy. The state and federal agencies that poured manpower into the area to find and recover as much of the shuttle as they could, as fast as they could, found that they had little or no communications. They didn’t have their own repeaters. Their radios were on different frequencies and different bands, with no common channels. Cell-phone coverage was spotty to nonexistent outside of town. It was fortunate that the hams of Nacogdoches were trained and ready to lead the army of amateur radio operators from Texas and the rest of the country who arrived to do what we often say we can do: provide communications when no one else can. Ham Radio Called in Early Rusty Sanders is the Fire Chief and Emergency Management Coordinator for the city of Nacogdoches. He is also amateur radio operator KD5GEN. He had been interested in ham radio since he was 13 years old, but finally got licensed just a few years ago after working with area hams in SKYWARN and emergency communications. The Nacogdoches hams have taken emergency communications seriously. Of their 50-member club, 30 routinely participate in drills and activations. Many have trained to be net control operators. They have established good relationships with city and county officials. They were as ready for this disaster as hams could be. One of the first things Rusty did that Saturday morning was bring Army Curtis, AE5P, into the EOC. They weren’t sure what role amateur radio would take in the developing emergency, but they wanted to be ready. Local hams immediately queued up on the Nacogdoches repeater to volunteer for whatever they might be needed to do.
Their first assignment was to pair up with
students and staff from Steven F. Austin State University and locate
debris. The school has programs in Geographic Information Systems and
mapping, and their teams were equipped with GPS receivers that were
accurate to less than a meter (consumer GPS systems are good to about 90
feet). When debris was recovered, the hams reported its location to the
command post at the EOC, and police were dispatched to cordon off the
fragments.
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of the Winter 2003 FM Column _________________ © Copyright 2003, CQ Communications, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced or republished, including posting to a website, in part or in whole, by any means, without the express written permission of the publisher, CQ Communications, Inc. Hyperlinks to this page are permitted.
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