This week has been busy so this report is a bit longer than usual.

I worked with Laura, KG6ZOM our new PIO, off and on this week to work on improving our messaging.  She has been working on social media, mostly Facebook for now, and put out a lot of good info.

Also, based on Laura’s recommendations, I remodeled our website home page, taking the “news” off of it and moving it to a new tab on the menu, aptly named “News”.  I used her recommended language to introduce ourselves and included a couple of CC-ARES action photos from the recent past.

I installed a Heil Sound headset, complete with foot pedal for Push-To-Talk, at position 2 on the Kenwood TM-D710GA VHF/UHF radio there. It works great! I plan to order headsets with foot pedals for positions 1 & 3, hopefully this week.

I updated our AREDN Mesh equipment in our CC-ARES sub net. I received a high gain dish antenna to be installed at Steve Herbert’s house on his AREDN Mesh radio that now is using an Omni antenna. This should greatly improve his connection to the other radios.  We have scheduled the project for Friday. If you are interested to see what these units look like, send me a message and we will “show you the ropes”.  I plan to improve our installation at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook repeater site, hopefully I can get this started this week.

I took delivery of three brand new Mikrotik hAP ac3 units after their price dropped almost 10%!  These units provide network connectivity for Incident Command sites that will use one small dish to connect to the network and will provide wired as well as wireless connectivity to those packages associated with our go box equipment. They will help by greatly increasing our connected speed and will allow things like voice and video conferencing, file transfers, and effortless sending and receiving of Winlink messages over microwaves, freeing up UHF/VHF channels for voice traffic.

We continue to prepare for the Great Shakeout exercise which is less than two weeks away. We had a planning meeting yesterday with all the player agencies in attendance. We will meet one last time late this week to finalize plans.  It is my hope that all who are free from other commitments will join us in the event and we will make it a fun and productive exercise.  Remember, we pass CERT traffic verbatim!  Please do not change a word…

I stay in contact with the adjacent ARES organizations and discovered on Monday that LAX ARES (at least Northeast) is preparing for the upcoming county-wide Medical Response & Surge Exercise (MRSE) to test the capabilities of the agencies involved.  This will happen on 11/16/23 and will only involve a handful of CC-ARES members. In the exercise, we will pass traffic between us and the Medial Alert Center (MAC), our EOC, simulated traffic with CCFD and the Medical Command Center.  Stay tuned for more.

Paul Krogstad, N6BTF, has been identified as our new Operations Officer and will be doing a lot of training on our equipment and procedures as he takes on new responsibilities, not the least of which is managing a pool of net control operators and scheduling them for the weekly nets!  Please give him all the support that you can so that we can make all of this happen together.

Thank you all for joining our Net or reading this online. Your interest and work with the CC-ARES community are greatly appreciated.

Have a great week ahead and we will talk next week. 7-3 for now, this is AJ7C.

Kevin Sherwood, AJ7C
President, Culver City ARES (CC-ARES)