🚀 go-pugleaf

To Sam k5kj,

Since your after thought is more urgent, I'll answer it first.

> On another topic, does anyone have an up to date list of HF frequencies 
> in use >  for > Hurricane nets?  

Today's ARRL Letter and yesterday's Bulletin give the latest day and
night frequencies for the Hurricane nets.  www.arrl.org has a full
archive of Letters and Bulletins.  Not sure about non-hurricane HF Wx
nets.  The Maritime ham nets will have some Wx.

>  NWS has already recruited non-Ham spotter groups wherever necessary.   

And cooperative reporting stations also, for even longer.
There is a move afoot to automate date reporting for the coop
stations, which will make them real time remotes.

> spotters to cover rural areas [at] relatively long distances from WSR-88D

Good point

> Another point of my original post ... [how many] >  SKYWARN groups...
> are organized around metropolitan areas, ..., support  spotting in
> surrounding rural counties.  ...

It would be unfortunate if your strong metropolitan operation didn't
cover adjacent areas because your counties are too small and the rural
folks fell on the far side of a political boundary.  (With your
geography, this is a inherent problem with RACES county-based
operations; we have the problem of state boundaries running through our
NWS WFO's CFA, which make either RACES or ARES central coordination
impractical.)

Suggestion:  You might be able to get RACES sponsorship for
regional skywarn operations from a higher echelon of the state
EMAgency, if it has higher echelons than County?  (Our state EMA has
several "Areas" of multiple counties each which subdivide into "Sectors"
which would include multiple of the smaller counties or parts of
larger counties of some states, each of which has some sort of RACES
echelon in addition to the town EMA RACES Radio Officers. Your
larger state must have some EMA tiers between county EOC and state EOC;
there are too many counties in Texas to have them all under one
state EOC!)

Here, SKYWARN seems strongest in the deeper suburbs and rural areas.
It doesn't hurt that our NWS WFO was moved to the boonies in the
modernization program ... if you're too tied to the city, you can't
get to meetings!  (Living in the city, this inconveniences me
periodically.  It also resulted in a change of coordinators years
ago when the move happened.)   Until recently, we were seriously
under-spotted in the city.  Our local WCM takes seriously the
feedback from the current spotters database and the reports log to
determine where to target next year's training sessions, where we're
thin on the ground.

> TAKE NOTE:  In my opinion, it is not important whether a SKYWARN group is
>  operated under RACES, ARES, REACT, The Cattlemen's Association
> or a volunteer fire department.  >  But each
> one may have advantages, depending on the local situation.

Right.

> RACES has its advantages, especially in large cities.

In some of our Cities, the Professionals at the EMD think they don't
need amateurs so we have NO RACES in some cities (like mine), only
ARES.  They've got such a polyglot of interagency communications in
their radios (put in place after the riots of the '60s) that they
might even be right, barring century storms and the next Cape Anne
Quake. Under State Law authorizing RACES here, I can't join RACES
for any purpose unless I'm appointed by my local EMD (there's an
official exception that a regional or state official may appoint me
if the local official certifies he has no requirements, but its
unusable in practice).

> ARES has its advantages too, especially in more rural areas
> with lower population density >  where having
> enough participation may be a problem.

Or where political boundaries are as idiotic as the state that named
the Gerrymander.

> Training is critical to the performance of any spotter group.  

True.

In some areas, you may find un-affiliated SKYWARN operators better
trained than either ARES or RACES, because they have regular
activations not just monthly drills and weekly nets.  To find better
regular operations you'd have to look to NTS (which has its sloppy
nets to be sure, but a lot of crisp operators too).

> And, how many multi-county or regional spotters groups
>  are out > there?  And how are they organized?

Our WCM (KBOX) has one master coordinator for _all_ skywarn nets
feeding his WFO, who coordinates calls-to-action, staffing the radio
position at the WFO, etc.  That coordinator has appointed a group of
four or five alternate coordinators who can relay a call to action if
he's unavailable.  The NWS met on duty can also activate individual
nets or spotters with the data on hand, but they prefer to make one
phone call and offload that work when they can.  The master coordinator
is also the SKYWARN coordinator within the local ARES section, and the
SKYWARN coordinators in adjacent states covered by the same WFO
coordinate with him and for counties covered by this WFO take direction
from him.  It's unclear to me how coordinators in the other
jurisdictions are chosen; they probably just emerge as obviously the
person that others follow.  Some hold ARES or RACES appointments as
well, some may not.  Our nets use wide-area repeaters that sometimes
cover multiple jurisdictions, and we try to have at least one
net/repeater covering each jurisdiction, with backup and relay.  Some
of our nets are supported by ARES, RACES/EMA, or RACES/ARES teams on
their home repeaters; some are merely hosted by sympathetic clubs whose
general membership barely tolerates us.  We have had cooperative nets
with SKYWARN/RACES sharing a repeater during an event (the state RO
read the latest NWS events to my net since he had a working teleprinter
circuit and I didn't, and I held traffic for him when he was off
frequency and one of his stations needed to pass traffic) and we've had
events where one or the other QSY'd to a backup frequency to leave the
other free to use the primary.  State EMA/RACES allows us use of their
mountain-top 440/6m linked repeaters for relay use.

(You can download our local ops plan from the website if you want
more detail on KBOX Skywarn.)

As you may guess from our QTH, Twisters are not our primary concern,
although for obvious reasons we do obsess about the few
opportunities we get.  (-: Here abouts, just seeing a wallcloud that you
can be sure of is a successful "chase". :-)  We do get a few
twisters; Great Barrington and Worcester have had major league ones,
and we get a few ropey ones each year, and there's always with the possibility
of another Big one to watch out for.
 Hail, straightline winds, downburts, flash and other floods, Hurricanes,
Nor'easters, Blizzards, and Icestorms all mix it up up here ... the
jet stream is not infrequently nearby, so derechoes and downbursts
can be pretty rough ... and not quite weather but even more
potentially disastrous, the Cape Anne Fault is due to let go with a
M6.5 any time, as it's been quiet since 1750 and is good for one every
200-300 years the experts say, and downtown only recently put in a
California code ... plenty to worry about, plenty to train for.

Bill N1vux
-- 
Bill Ricker  N1VUX  wdr@world.std.com  "The freedom of the press belongs 
http://world.std.com/~wdr               to those who own one."--A.J.Liebling