DAREN of WV News January 6, 2013(.A70)
WA8LLM (304) 679-3470 wa8llm@yahoo.com
WOOD COUNTY EMERGENCY COMMUNICATIONS
P.O. BOX 3328, PARKERSBURG, WV 26103
http://www.wc8ec.org
DAREN News, are articles and information about the Digital Amateur Radio "Emergency" Network of WV, which operates on 145.69 MHz. Anyone having any information about DAREN, or Amateur Radio in general, and would like to share it with others, may send it to WA8LLM @ PKBGWV on 145.69 MHz, or to my E-Mail: wa8llm@yahoo.com. A State Wide DAREN NET is operated every Saturday from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, and lately, before and after those hours. The DAREN Net Announcement, showing the MAIN NCS, ALTERNATE NCS, NODEs accessible to both, and the previous week's check-ins, are posted by Thursday on most of the Main county DAREN PBBS'. The DAREN News can also be found on the wc8ec.org website.
I hope everyone had a safe New Year. Now that the holidays are over, we can start planning for months to come. Since winter hasn't had a good start, we need to get ready when it does. In this past year we have lost a lot of DAREN Packet Radio stations. I'll be able to get a couple of the stations back in operation, but we need help getting other ones back on the air. If you know of a good location to place a NODE/PBBS to help the system, now would be a good time to put one together and get it into operation. The cost of the radios isn't too much, but the Packet Terminal Node Controller (TNC) seems to be going up in price. When the DAREN system first started the price of the TNC was a lot cheaper than the price of the radio, but now it's the other way around. I received an E-Mail from Roy Humes, N8RH, who said that he still has some old equipment just laying around, that he would like to place in service. If you have been thinking about putting a station on the air, you might contact Roy and work out some kind of deal. I'm afraid that if the cost of the TNC's doesn't start coming back down in price, it will be hard to keep the DAREN system on operation. At one time there were 34 counties out of the 55 that had a main DAREN NODE/PBBS in their county. Today there are only about 20 stations and some of them are unable to communicate with other stations in the state. If you would like to help keep the DAREN system in operation, maybe we can come up with enough equipment to fill in the holes that have grown in the past few years.
I've been in communications with Bob Sellars, KB2FEL, about getting the DAREN News and weekly Net Announcement posted on the PBBS' that I can no longer connect to. Bob said that if I E-Mail him the News and Announcement that he will post them in some of the areas that I can't get to.
There were only 48 check-ins to the State Wide DAREN Net this week. Earl Cutlip, KB8FHW, needs only one more check-in to make 50.