Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891
Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891
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The first two articles in this series provided a progress overview and hardware review of the (Wahkiakum County Emergency Responder Radio System) project. This article covers how the system will be used in normal everyday use and in more widespread emergency situations. In normal use each of the participating agencies (Sheriff/SAR, each Fire/EMS district, HHS, PUD, county and town public works, school district) has its own band with its own set of local direct channels. Each of those groups also...
The first article in this series provided an overview and progress update on the Wahkiakum County Emergency Responder Radio System (WCERRS) project. This article covers two categories of the hardware: repeater backbone and user radios. The hardware backbone of our new system has five repeater towers (see map in the first article), with five pairs of repeater antennas on each tower, small buildings at the base of each tower containing the repeaters' hardware, and a three-station dispatch...
The Wahkiakum County Emergency Responder Radio System (WCERRS) project is underway and progressing ahead of schedule. The system being replaced had its last major upgrade in 2005. This system costs us about $2,000 per month to continue making temporary patches to keep it going. It has real holes in its coverage, requiring responders to change frequencies when moving around the county and to also act as relay stations for some parts of the county. The new system is expected to go live in...
Our local radio club, the N7WAH Wahkiakum Amateur Radio Club, is again offering an evening series of classes to help you prepare for your Technician Class Amateur radio license. The class will meet Wednesday evenings, 6:30- 8:00 p.m., beginning October 2 and continuing for the following six Wednesdays with the test being offered at the final meeting, on Wednesday November 13. Since we will be meeting at the robot room at Wahkiakum High School, we will need school-age children to be accompanied by a parent or to have completed a school district...
The Wahkiakum Mecha Mules entered the Amateur Radio School Club Roundup last February with modest goals: Score better than the previous fall, talk to more schools than before, and talk to stations in more states than before. The goal of this contest is to use Amateur Radios to talk with as many other schools in as many other states as possible. No cell phones, no land-lines, no internet. Our two high school leads, Peter Vik and Cor Hoogendoorn and our three lead middle school assistants, Steve,...
Marie Glusenkamp-Perez, incumbent 3rd Congressional District representative, visited the Wahkiakum County Fair last Saturday after a standing room only meet-and-greet at the Mile 38 Brewery earlier in the afternoon. She told a group of parents gathered for the 4-H Awards, "I’m grateful to everyone involved — kids, parents, teachers — for making mechanical know-how and working with their hands a priority.” Her year-end report is available on the US Congressional website at: https:/...
What would you do if the internet is down, the cell phone towers are overloaded or gone and you want to get a message to far-off relatives that you are alright? The Wahkiakum County Amateur Radio Club (call sign N7WAH) is prepared to help you. Stop by our booth at Bald Eagle Days on Saturday to experience how easy sending that message is. We will be located in front of the courthouse. At our booth you can quickly fill out a simple radiogram form that will place your message into a global radio message system named WINLINK. From our booth,...
The Wahkiakum School District began its search for a replacement superintendent with an announcement carried throughout the state. The school board received many applications and invited five candidates for in-person interviews. The first round of interviews is now completed. The school board has invited back two candidates for an additional interview, and to meet the public. The two candidates will be here sometime next week, June 17th-21st. The dates and times were not available at press time. This will be a great opportunity for anyone in...
The Wahkiakum School District began its search for a replacement superintendent with an announcement carried throughout the state. The school board received many applications and invited five candidates for in-person interviews. These interviews are in process this week and next. During the in-person interviews each candidate meets with school board members and staff who represent the various departments at the school. Remaining staff and interested students are given the opportunity to meet the candidates at the end of the interview. After...
To start off the day our team headed off to the Natural History Museum. On the way there google maps was being quite obstinate, specifically Amanda’s Google maps. However, mine worked perfectly well so I lead the group to the museum. The museum was covered with plenty of beautiful pieces of the history of our world. There were statues, fossils, and gems everywhere you looked. It was impossible to rip my eyes from any of the gorgeous sights. As we wandered the museum, it was quickly noticeable there were six sections: Animals, Fossils, Human H...
The Mecha Mules Robotics Booster Club is hosting a fundraiser at the Robot Room at Wahkiakum High School Saturday May 4th, beginning at 11:00am and ending about 2:00pm. This year we qualified for, and sent teams to, Regional and State in FIRST Tech Challenge, SkillsUSA, and Seaperch. We are again sending a team to Seaperch Internationals in Maryland to defend our World Championship title. While we have been successful in writing grants to cover most of our equipment costs, and the school...
Last Saturday 13 teams from SW Washington gathered at Lower Columbia College for the first robotics tournament of this season. Each team plays six matches, each with an Alliance Partner, competing with two other teams. Your partner in one match might be one of your opponents in another match. This promotes a cooperative real-world skill and attitude encouraging helping everyone do better so we can all do well. At the end of the day, your Wahkiakum SD and 4-H Mecha-Mules had won five matches and...
Last weekend we completed another test of our county's ability to communicate during severe emergency conditions. This nation-wide activity is called Winter Field Day: Amateur radio stations from all over the country attempt to contact as many other stations as they can in the 24 hours from 11 a.m. Saturday to 11 a.m. Sunday. With support from Wahkiakum school district our three-member team operated using an 1100' wire loop wire antenna strung between light posts surrounding a baseball field....
This unusual season of the First Tech Challenge robotics competition has ended after five months of practice, building, coding, more practice, presentations, 18 competition matches and then a final presentation to judges on Saturday. All done remotely. One strange season. Our team placed 15th out of 24 teams on the competition rankings and earned second place for the "Motivate" award. This is an excellent result for our young team given the stiff competition from the Seattle area schools. We ver...
Last June over 10,000 amateur radio operators from across the country participated in Field Day 2020. The objective was to see how many other stations you can contact in 24 hours. Because of covid restrictions our club chose to not set up our normal Field Day stations at Wahkiakum high school. Instead seven of our club members operated from home or mobile. Some operated batteries only, others used "shore power." In the "from home" category, competing with thousands of others, we had Richard...
Submitted by Ron Wright How well could we talk to each other during an emergency if all of the cell phone towers were down, land-lines were broken, no internet, and no power? That was the question the Wahkiakum County Amateur Radio Club set out to answer last Saturday October 3. In that scenario, we would expect most people would go to one of our county's seven fire halls or to one of the other gathering locations (Johnson Park or Wahkiakum High School), or to a high ground location in the...
The high school robotics team and a support group of middle school future robotics team members played for 15 hours traveling to Olympia and doing robotics with 35 other teams coming from Seattle to Vancouver in the Watt Interleague Championships. We played five matches, two-on-two, with many of the other teams. One of our matches was against the eventual winner from Union High school, Geared Reaction. They were tough! Robotics does not have school association levels - we are all in there...
Wahkiakum County Search and Rescue completed 2019 with a holiday celebration at the County Courthouse last Wednesday evening. The evening began with dinner provided by the Team Board of Directors and ended with search and rescue-related presents passed out by "Santa" Billy Goldsmith, and we had plenty to celebrate in between. By far the biggest is that we had no actual emergency call-outs this year (compared to eight last year). Thanks, everyone in the public for being safe! We also had an...
In the biggest "virtual get-together" of their year thousands of amateur radio clubs from across the country communicated last weekend via radio during a simulated major disaster. Our local club, N7WAH, pretended as if there were no cell service, no phone service, no fuel for generators or vehicles, and no mains electricity. We used batteries and solar power only. We gathered on one of the ballfields at Wahkiakum HS, setting up Friday evening before the "emergency" then operated for 24 hours...
Thursday March 14 from 12:30 to 3:00 p.m., Wahkiakum high School will host the second annual Wahkiakum Wohbot Wohundup, aka “WWW.” The community is invited. We will show off robot and programming projects from students K-12. There will also be robot competitions with other schools. New events this year are "Moon Maze Bomb Run" and "Air Slalom Drone Races." Sheriff Howie will again serve as lead judge to keep events in order. The Wahkiakum County Amateur Radio Club is providing technical judges. 4-H is again providing medals and other sup...
Monday night two minutes after the power outage started the Wahkiakum County Amateur Radio Club emergency communications network was activated using the Incident Command System protocol (W7ERY Ron, WA6TTR Gordon, KG7WSQ Jim, KC7IVJ Dale and KE7IHH Larry) Within 10 minutes we had five more stations on our county emergency simplex frequency of 145.55 mHz (K7SH Steve, KB7AJY Jean, KI7YMM Peter, AE6DI Mark, AE7RD Dave). We quickly determined that Cathlamet, Elochoman Valley and Puget Island were out. So, within 10 minutes we had a total of 10...
Photos by Jean Kelsey Last weekend was busy in Wahkiakum County. Along with the Kite Festival and the Puget Island Garage Sale there was the national Amateur Radio Field Day wherein roughly 40,000 amateur radio operators all over the country take their radios and antennas out of their houses and into a field for 24 hours to test emergency preparedness. Our county's radio club, N7WAH, with the help of Wahkiakum PUD, Wahkiakum 4-H, Wahkiakum School District and Smokey Waters set up at a baseball...
Last Thursday your Wahkiakum 4H Robotics Club competed at the Hayez Dayez Camas invitational with 12 other teams from seven other schools. We came away with three of the 12 medals: First Place in Line Racers unlimited (Lydia Blalock), Second Place in Line Racers unlimited (Audrey Morton), and Second Place in Line Racers restricted (Montana Stephens). As you can tell from the results our students focused this winter on preparing their Line Racers. We had one more entrant in Line Racers for a full...
EmComm Antenna supports mounted at Wahkiakum HS Story and photo by Ron Wright Monday afternoon the County Sheriff's Department of Emergency Services teamed up with the Wahkiakum School District, Wahkiakum County PUD and the Wahkiakum Amateur Radio Club to get us one step closer to being able to deal effectively with "the big one." Today's step was to hang pulleys and ropes at the baseball field so that emergency antennas can very quickly be hoisted and used to facilitate communications from our...
This past weekend Wahkiakum 4H Robotics went to the Showare Center in Kent for the FIRST Tech Challenge State Championships. While our team and robot performed better than it ever has, we finished as one of the "also-rans." Team members shared their thoughts on the day and what we learned: Ben McLain: "It was fascinating to see all of the different teams competing. They all had really intuitive ideas and it was nice to see how it all came together. It was a really friendly environment." Erik Kolditz: "It was really fun to compete against all...
