Important Announcements

Important Announcements

Important Announcements
Below are some of the photos of the Antenna Install on 1/27/2009 at Home Depot, Warrenton, Oregon. SEARC Trustee & Clatsop County ARES EC Don Hillgaertner [WA7TEM] and SEARC Vice President Ken Lucke [WA7PIX] (the photographer, so you never see him here) were there to supervise the installation by a third party company, per the terms of the contract with Home Depot, who donated the cost of the entire setup to the club, including enough to pay for the radio equipment (which will be in the form of an off-site stored Go-Pack) after first approaching the club unsolicited with the idea. This is the first Home Depot in the country to have such a system installed!

Home Depot believes that by having this station in a location where people will naturally be gathering, not only due to their being backup-generator powered, but by the nature of the supplies that they carry applicable to almost any emergency situation, it will put Amateur Radio Operators in a position to offer much assistance during an emergency, including passing of Health & Welfare Traffic via NTS, bolstering local communications efforts, and providing a central location well known to the public.

Home Depot is also quite aware that Amateur Radio Operators, by nature of the FCC Rules & Regulations, can have nothing to do with sales of products from the Home Depot location. The operators who will be at that location, as well as in the EOC, in times of emergency will be very well trained and instructed on policy and procedures regarding this. Any inquiries about products that the Home Depot carries will be in terms of resources, not products - thus, the EOC can ask if Home Depot "has any generators left", but they cannot ask a price, cannot arrange for the generators to be held, delivered, nor any other sort of a business transaction - the station operators can answer "Yes, they have five 5500W generators left", but they cannot tell Home Depot to put them aside, etc. - all sales negotiations have to go outside the Amateur Radio loop. To remove even a shadow of a "grey area" from this situation, FCC input was sought and followed.

Update: we even made ARRL news, which referred back to the online version of the Daily Astorian article about the Home Depot Install.
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After all was said and done, it was a 389 foot run of LMR 400 cable with a Diamond X-50 4.5 db gain antenna installed, and we ended up with a SWR of 1.2:1 or less across the whole 2 meter band, and a feedline loss of less than 3db, which gives a net gain on the system of about 1.5db. We were astonished at those numbers with that long of a run of coax. The actual antenna site was not ideal (Home Depot's lifts would not go any higher), but a simple extension tube to the antenna later will lift it clear of the building. Even in the position it was in, and running low power, it easily hit all three W7BU repeaters in the county, (145.45, 146.74, and 146.76) as well as the 146.66 and 147.18 repeaters, even on low power (10W).

Important Announcements

Important Announcements
Important Announcements