[HamWAN PSDR] Seattle/King County Red Cross now on HamWAN

[Randy Neals]

FYI,

Today I attended KC Red Cross in Seattle with Frank, K7RSD.
They operate a Red Cross Disaster Services radio room in the basement of
the Seattle RC building and have a 50' tower on the roof with VHF and HF
antennas / station.

We installed a Mikrotik SXQ on the tower pointing at Beacon-S3. The path is
short/visual and about -65dBm / 7 Mbps up/down.

We deployed a small ethernet switch and HamWAN / Seattle ACS IP Phone in
the RC radio room, all of which can run on building generator system.
Tested SIP phone with Seattle ACS / Seattle EOC. (HamWan ext 8081)

Red Cross team is interested in connectivity from Seattle to Spokane.
Apparently Spokane is a staging area for moving disaster assistance west to
Seattle. I advised nothing near term, but that longer term something is
likely to develop re Ham Networks to Spokane.

I also recognize that the disaster potential/risk factors for E Washington
are different than for W Washington. Having a HamWan network extend over
the mountains to Yakima/Wenatchee and relying on public Internet to then
reach Spokane is likely workable as the typical Earthquake scenario for
Puget Sound that emergency planners work to isn't likely to affect
infrastructure in Eastern Washington.

The Northwest Region Red Cross is HQ in Seattle. There are branch/chapter
offices in Kennewick, Spokane, Bremerton, Bellingham, Everett and Tacoma.
Most have a disaster service radio station.

If you have an interest in helping your local Red Cross chapter office with
a connection to HamWAN, I can put you in touch with hams at the Seattle
regional office and perhaps there is a pull-through effort to get more of
the braches on the network.

For our DMR friends...
There may be a good opportunity to support NW Red Cross disaster services
via DMR talk groups. Given the wide reach of DMR, that might be a tool the
RC could have in their kit. The wide spread nature of Red Cross offices and
regions, seem to be a poster-child use-case for PNW DMR.

Randy
W3RWN
Seattle
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