Last night’s tsunami advisory made for an unexpected and interesting hasty setup of a radio room in my house. I received the notification from the Alertable app after having a couple of lovely happy hour beers at the local pub with my son, and thought to myself that it would be a good time to turn on the radio and see what happens. I was not disappointed.
I started with my workhorse handheld, a Yaesu FT-65, and tuned in to the main repeater for my local club (West Coast Amateur Radio Association (WARA), 146.840MHz). I then grabbed my Quansheng UV-K5 and tuned it to 146.520MHz (National VHF Calling Frequency) and 146.680MHz (Cowichan Valley Amateur Radio Society (CVARS), doubling as the VHF link to the Island Trunk System). I then ran downstairs and grabbed my RTL-SDR V4 dongle and set up the dipole antenna that came with the kit.
As this was literally brand new information, I was at the bleeding edge of the radio traffic, and the evening started with a couple of calls between local hams on WARA’s repeater, including input from Ed (VE7SDH), the fellow out in Sooke who provides our daily weather updates on the CVARS Morning Net.
The provincial government’s EOC (VE7PEP) nationalized the Island Trunk System shortly after 1800 local, establishing an emergency net and taking over traffic on the ITS. I didn’t jot down the operator’s name, but he was an excellent net controller, a job I love doing when I get the chance with WARA.
I had some challenges with the RTL-SDR, as I was having a tough time reading signals. Traffic on the radio was fairly sparse still, so I was able to spend a little time googling how to make it all work, and eventually found a batch of settings that seemed to work well for receiving.
At my radio’s busiest, I was getting updates from WARA, PREOC, some minor traffic on 146.520MHz, and later, tuned in to the Clallam County Amateur Radio Club’s Tuesday net which I stumbled onto by accident.
It seemed that most hams who were tuned in were doing the same thing I was, which was rapid-refreshing tsunami.gov for the latest bulletins, getting the updated/upgraded advisories, etc, and then hearing the read-backs from VE7PEP (or CCARC’s Simplex nets) as they were coming.
Interestingly, I’d forgotten it was Tuesday, and at 1900 the WARA Tuesday Night Rag Chew started, and I found myself in conversation with four other hams, sharing info, happenings, etc. It’s been a while since I was in a ragchew session like that, having done a couple through Puget Sound Repeater Group (PSRG) in Seattle earlier on in my time as a ham. I’ll be back to that net again in the future.
I did discover that my HT in close proximity to the receiving antenna on my RTL-SDR got quite overloaded when I hit the transmit button, so I will definitely be mindful of that later.
I folded up shop around 2030 or thereabouts as I was starting to pivot towards bedtime in prep to return to work in the morning. I kept the Quansheng by my bedside as the first waves were due to arrive in Haida Gwaii shortly after 2200, and after minimal impact was noted there, PREOC shut down the net on ITS, and for me, that seemed like a natural segue into sleepytown.
All in all, this was a very interesting evening to have 4 input sources running and keeping on top of things. A few rapid-fire observations:
- Got my radio stuff up and running in about 10 minutes
- RTL-SDR is a giant power hog, draining around 1%/min on my laptop or more
- Have to be mindful of transmitting in proximity to RTL-SDR
- Amateur radio is fun!
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