ACES

Oregon ACES has caught the eye of the Oregon State Office of Emergency Management (OEM). A program such as this has the potential to have a wide-scale positive impact on the people providing the backup emergency communications that OEM depends on in a disaster. At the request of the office, Daron N7HQR and Gordon WX7EM (Tillamook County EM and ARES EC) presented the details, status, and future of the program on May 21, 2010. OEM director Ken Murphy said that he thought the program looked encouraging and that it would be a resource for county emergency managers.

Oregon ACES conducted their first "Train the Trainer" event this weekend. The purpose of the meeting was to cover all of the classroom material with the first batch of instructors, as well as go over guidelines and procedures for teaching the course. We had at least two instructors from each of Tillamook, Lincoln, and Washington counties that were able to dedicate over sixteen hours of their time to this process.

The process leaves us with a good batch of qualified instructors and we expect to announce some course offerings very soon!  

The Advanced Certification draft outline has been published and is open for public comment.  You can help improve the quality and relevance of the material in the course by reviewing the draft and providing your feedback about what is good, bad, and missing.  Anyone from anywhere can submit feedback and we invite everyone to do so.

On Saturday, April 3rd 2010 at 0900 PDT several groups  across the state began to conduct the first Oregon ACES ACT exercise.  There were stations in at least three counties in Oregon, as well as several from outside the state, from as far away as Spokane, WA.  At the time of this writing, reports have been submitted showing at least 47 individual Amateur Operators participating in the exercise.  Read on for the rest of the story!

Today, the FCC granted Oregon ACES the vanity club callsign of:

Daron Wilson (N7HQR) represented Oregon ACES today in a presentation to the Oregon Emergency Management Association (OEMA). He presented an overview of our program and directed the audience to the website for more information.  The presentation at the meeting has already generated some additional feedback on the basic course outline, adding to the growing list of emergency managers who have contributed to the project.