ACES

On Saturday, June 5th, Oregon ACES presented their program to the attendees at SeaPac.   The material was well-received by members and leadership from both local and state level ARES/RACES groups in attendance.  Two representatives from the Washington ACES group were there and explained their interest in the program and plans for the future.  In addition to covering the details of the program, we also announced the dates of the first two course offerings in Tillamook and Lincoln counties.  If you would like to attend either of these, go to the sign up page.

During the presentation, we had a few "pop quiz" questions from the course material, and one "performance based" contest to see who could program the offset, tone, etc into their handheld the quickest.  We gave away emergency fold-up J-Pole kits to the winners.  It was a fun way to break up the presentation, and also demonstrated two things: 1) not everyone in the room knew the answers to the questions, and 2) everyone needs more practice programming the obscure functions of their radios!

If you were unable to attend but want to get an Oregon ACES lanyard for your agency credentials, find a development team member and we will get you one.

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: