Bump.

Great thread, OP!

What you did there is my bread-and-butter for the NG.

Make communications work.

HF has been the biggest challenge for the DSCA mission.  No one wants to make it go the way it should, that takes money and training.  My best NCO for setting up HF ALE went back to the JFHQ and it was a huge blow to capabilities in the unit.

Having HF up and running with multiple freqs means that you can talk from 5-100 miles, as long as your antenna work (Harris antenna couplers) or you can adjust fire to make them work.  HF antenna theory is 50% magic and 50% experience, training only tells you where to start getting the experience.

What they should have done was activate NG guard soldiers from all over the US to come down and set up issued HF radios to provide comms.  You shouldn't have needed to go out there for that.

Great AAR and really appreciate your hard work and service.

There were quite a number of active duty folks down there and there was a pretty large DoD contingent at the JFO in San Juan. One Army unit came in to the office in Ponce where I was and pretty much set up a CNN newsroom looking area for themselves complete with satcom and probably 100 or so cat5 cables coming out of a switch. That was their idea of comms.

I actually enjoyed doing the class because the students were genuinely interested in learning. And, since we taught them to fish, hopefully those folks will now be able to teach others. If asked, I wouldn't mind doing that kind of class for NG units here because I think it's really important, particularly for NG folks who almost always get called up by their governor to respond to a disaster. The ability to communicate via HF is vital, especially in the chaos immediately following an event.

Hopefully the AAR is worth something to folks. I really appreciated all the support from the forum here and wanted to return the favor.

Thank you for taking time to write.

Given choice to do this again, what would you have done different to provide a reliable power source for your radio(s) and for other ham radio teams?

OP you could write an SOP and checklist with what you went through there.

If I thought there'd be fuel, I''d have taken a new-in-the-box generator down with me, like one of the Harbor Freight Predator quiet inverter ones. The airlines were letting those go as checked baggage as long as it had never been opened (and hence didn't have gasoline in it). Of course, I would not have been able to take it back with me so I'd probably just donate it to one of the aid groups down there.

More realistically, I would have liked to have had a bigger (higher capacity) version of the LiFePO4 power pack I had. The one I had was a 35Ah battery with charge controller and inverter. It would have been better to maybe have a 100Ah version. Even with the one I had, I would have needed two of the folding solar panels to keep the battery charged if I was really using the transmitter a lot. The 105W panel was great but it was only giving me about 80W whereas I needed more like double that if the duty cycle had been higher. The powerpack I had was roughly 12lbs. so it was pretty easy to hand carry on the airplane. The 100Ah version probably would probably still qualify as a carry-on as far as size goes. The solar panels would fit in a rolling duffel like I had.

The other option is just to use a car battery and charge it up periodically by starting the motor. Again, though, that assumes you have fuel and you're willing to use it to keep your radio going. (That and it assumes your car didn't get blown off a cliff by a 200mph gust.)

Yes, I definitely could.


Are you asking me to put something together?

Welcome back OP.  Great write up.  I appreciate what you accomplished over there.  Good man

It would be a good idea.

I know I'm going to be vilified for some of my comments below. I wasn't there, I don't know what happened, etc., etc. I'm not trying to be a dick. But, for the sake of discussion...

That might be an unfair indictment. Anyone would be outclassed by such an event. There is simply no economical way to prepare or respond. The government doesn't have the resources. Indeed, the government shouldn't have the resources, it's not their job to save people from themselves. That should be for insurance companies. Sorry, a little bit of Libertarianism leaking out there But, seriously, there's no way the taxpayers would prepare the billions of not trillions required to actually deal with this sort of stuff in a way where everything turns out to be unicorns and ice cream in just a few weeks. I give ARC, FEMA and everyone else that went over there a pass.

ARC's hams, ARC's tasking. Seems reasonable. Not coordinating on assets is probably a side effect of not knowing how to use them themselves, and not having enough of them to make a significant dent anyway.

Don't even need a second. a) Not surprising. b) If it was my organization, any organization, and I had commo assigned to me, I'd use them to facilitate my own command and control first before looking to satisfy other needs.

The satphone was absolutely the right tool for the job. It is not silly. The satphone was not the mistake. The mistake was, with only a single critical resource like that at each hospital, they didn't send someone to operate and minister to the satphone. And obviously not having a directory of phone numbers was egregiously stupid. But picking on satcom as being the wrong comm's modality is wrong. That it needs to remain outside is an issue easily solved using an outdoor antenna kit.

Same comment as above--no way could anyone ever deploy any of anything in sufficient quantities to make more than a small dent. From water to commo, it's all just a game of "relief force theater". And, the more complex the resource, the less you have of it. HF comm's are probably the most complex comm's resource imaginable.

Winlink is too slow for volume traffic, and RMS stations too sparse for reliable connections.

SHARES would be better off blowing the money on more satcom kit. They'd move more voice and data more reliably with far less of a logistics and expertise footprint.

I don't think they did. They both built the largest force they could fund/afford and that's what they have. There is no way they could have built a force sufficient to make more than a minor dent in the problem. Politically and fiscally unsupportable.

This went without saying. They sent (could afford to send) 50 people. For sake of argument, pretend there was an infinite number of people that could go, all with magic communicators that worked 100% perfectly all the time. How many would they have needed total?

Satcom is absolutely the correct answer. The logistics of keeping an Iridium or INMARSAT voice/data terminal running are SO much lower than that of an HF station or even a VHF station. Size, weight, power, complexity, setup, and manning/training are all a fraction of an HF station footprint. Power requirements are much lower and could easily be supplied by those super cool Bioenno kits with solar charger. You'd never need a generator. Probability of comm's is much higher, data rates much higher. Capital cost for a satcom kit, including an outdoor antenna, is comparable to an HF kit.

The only downside to satcom are the access fees. Those do mount up.

what is "the ARC" and what does it do?

the American Red Cross.

thanks

I actually don't disagree that neither the ARC nor FEMA really would have been likely to have the level of resources necessary just sitting around waiting for a disaster to happen. Nobody has that big a pool (or the money as you point out) to have that level. I was just making the observation that neither anticipated the scope nor did they have (or get) the resources in place in sufficient numbers to respond to the magnitude of the problem. I don't think anybody had really "what if"'d that whole scenario or if they did, they concluded there would be no way to afford to have that big a stand-by crew and equipment stores. Plus, even if they did, they'd already expended a lot of resources, particularly people, on the disasters that preceded Maria.

As for a satphone for a hospital, I'd have to disagree, at least in part. If all the hospitals had been able to talk to each other and a central supply point, they would have had a much easier time dealing with which hospitals were open to which kind of patients and what the needs were in terms of supplies and equipment. If they were all talking and listening, they all would have gotten a much better situational awareness about all the hospitals than you'd ever get out of a satphone going poit-to-point. In one town, all the hospitals had a face-to-face meeting at 2pm every day to do that coordination even after they got satphones. Probably would have been better if they could have communicated via HF along with other towns and FEMA. In one of the federal medical facilities, they stopped using the satcom broadband unit they had because their patient records and tracking system was getting bogged down trying to upload too much in real time. They switched to local storage and would do a local dump to take by hand to the remote location periodically.

One thing I noticed as time went on was that satcom in general started saturating both the satellites and the ground relay stations because the systems weren't designed to have that many concurrent subscribers all generating huge amounts of traffic simultaneously. The more different groups got theirs on-line, the worse the problem started getting.

Nobody that I saw down there cared about access fees (which I'm sure were gigantic) but a local government would have a hard time paying the $6k for a BGAN terminal as well as the monthly toll just to have an active line if you need it. VHF is cheap but range limited when your repeaters get taken out. So, it would only make sense that local governments think about HF, particularly when there aren't other options realistically available.

Discussion is good, that's why we're here, right?

I wonder how small and lite a self contained vhf repeater system could be put together? Sort of like a go kit, or emcom, but just stuff to deploy a repeater.
Mast, antenna, coax, cans, repeater, and a gen set.

Drop that and a couple guys to protect it and make sure it keeps running in a good location.

Its not a long range solution, but at a city wide range it would work.

Duplex cans. Or isolation cans. I just call them cans. They attenuate  signals to make a duplex repeater work.

I'm slowly getting around to actually crossing items off my after-disaster to-do list. I ordered lightning isolators, another RF isolator, and a bunch of ferrites of various sizes. I also ordered a mast that would fit into my rolling duffels directly:

Packtenna 31 foot mast

Also, I have completed MARS mods on all my rigs. The FT-991 was the one I was reluctant to dig into to do the mod. As it turns out, it really wasn't all that hard and I could probably have done it either while I was in Atlanta waiting to go to PR or once I got there. Oh well, 20/20 hindsight and all.

I think I also have a mo' betta method for grounding that should fit into a small case with the radio. I have a larger rugged case that I've used before with my radio. I may see if I can tailor some foam inserts specifically to all the crap I want to keep together for my ft-991 and/or ft-857d. I'm actually fairly certain that the new QRP rig, its tuner, and the Signalink that goes with it will fit in one of those PS/4 game pouches. It's what I put my ft-991 in for the trip.

Somehow, I don't think Santa is going to bring me a Pactor 4 modem, though.

I truly think it was a case of they had what they had, and they brought what they had. Nobody can afford to prep and staff in a way that would actually do anything more than show that they were "doing something". You can totally rule something like a tornado zone, or a flood zone, or a forest fire zone, but when a hurricane comes and wipes everything down to the bedrock except the people, who emerge from the ruins like cockroaches, well, good luck with that! Again, I give all of the responding organizations a "pass" on this.

Not sure I understand what you are trying to say, because accomplishing this with satcom is trivial.

Again, not understanding. Put everyone on a satphone telecon and, bam!, you are GTG.

You can't have a multi-way telecon on HF, and even if you could, you can't guarantee the propagation to make it happen. Not seeing it...

Well, duh, that's just using the wrong tool for the job. Don't throw satcom under the bus because people don't know how to use it correctly. On the other hand, it sounds like it almost worked, which says a lot about how damn good it is.

Now that truly is a serious problem worthy of further consideration. I would handle this by putting everyone on a sked for satcom access. PR is probably only served by a single INMARSAT spot, but both they and Iridium can do some very interesting things with respect to allocating spot beams. I wonder how high up that conversation went between the USG and the providers, or even if it did at all? Nevertheless, satcom at it's crappiest is still going to outperform HF.

That makes no sense. If the gov. has money to burn for access and usage, then satcom is the way to go. There is no other downside compared to any other communications medium. And very few people need a $6K BGAN terminal. Hell, you can get spankin' new INMARSAT phones off of Amazon for less than $600. I can't even buy an IC-7200 for that. Roughly double that to put a vehicular antenna on it and park a van, bus or trailer as a commo shelter outside the hospital or use a convenient top floor office with a window (put the mobile antenna on the edge of the roof). Relay routine comm's from there using hospital internal comm's (phone if it's working, VHF if it's not), and people show up in the shelter/office for the daily telecon as required. No fuss, no muss.

>> Agreed. I have no doubt that the various agencies are re-thinking their strategies for a major disaster. They still might not be able to muster enough resources for multiple large disasters simultaneously. The cost would just be prohibitive.

As for the satphone at the hospital, again, it's just not that simple. You'd have to coordinate and arrange, up front, a dial-in conference line and make sure every user had the number and knew when to call in. And, that assumes that the phone actually works and has been configured properly (which I gather wasn't quite true with a few of them). The Iridium phones down there (my team mate had one) were hit or miss as to whether they worked there or not. It wasn't clear to me why. I'd thought about picking up some kind of satphone or sat message device like an Inreach before I left to go down there. I just wasn't sure I was going to be able to justify the expense for a one-shot event. The Inmarsat phone you linked looks interesting. The plans don't seem <<that>> outrageous but it's still a pretty hefty sum and on-going bill for a "nice to have just in case" kind of thing for an individual.

Can't have a multi-way telecon on HF? Huh? What exactly are the round-table ragchew nets I hear all the time, then? But, there again, everybody would have to know what frequency to use and know enough about the radio to be able to use it. That would require up-front planning, coordination, equipment and training that they clearly didn't have the chance to do beforehand. There's a lesson there.

IMHO, I don't think that HF is going to be able to transfer enough data to make it worthwhile for that purpose. Voice, definitely. A small number of e-mail messages, sure, although even that was not without problems. A report with pictures and lots of data, nope. Satcom is the only way that will go if other means aren't available. But, it won't be with a phone, it will be with a broadband terminal of some sort.

That describes the necessary conditions for ANY telecon under ANY conditions. It's not rocket science. The business and government world uses telecons extensively. I'm on no less than three a week, and occasionally three a day. Your argument has nothing to do with the satphone. It would even be true if it were an "HF telecon".

That is merely indicative of poor logistics and semi-poor training. Both are necessary to some degree with satphones, but not nearly to the same degree as HF radio. Compare the logistics of deploying 50 satphones vs. 50 HF stations. The former have to be delivered, tested and local personnel trained in their use, then can be left with said local personnel, with occasional maintenance visits, perhaps. Their care and feeding are not much different than a cellular phone. And they work no better or worse than cell phones if the correct phone directory is not provided and/or people don't make the right calls at the right times. If you have some location that is so ultimately stupid that they can't handle making phone calls then by all means dispatch and post a "communicator" to that location. But such a person would not need nearly the same amount of knowledge, expertise or logistical support as an HF operator, and therefore you could potentially have a lot of them, and they would be easy to source from any average pool of volunteers, no special skills required.

I was thinking more along the lines of an HF subnet participating in a larger, mostly satcom based telecon. As for the rest of it, it's just an appointment! Hell, I've got three weekly telecons and some random pop-up telecons in my Outlook calendar. Call it a "sked" if you want. How hard can it be to disseminate such information? Not hard at all!

In summary, it would seem that your primary concerns are associated with the execution of normal, mundane, work-a-day communications tasks, tasks that are executed by normal, mundane, work-a-day folk, white collar and blue collar, a zillion times a day as a routine. Things such as coordination and dissemination of meeting dates, times, phone numbers (or frequencies, if you prefer), etc. These things are trivial, almost beneath notice. They happen automatically in business and government every minute of every day. Nobody even thinks about them. It is extremely hard to believe that governmental and quasi-governmental/para-public organizations such as ARC and FEMA are not completely familiar with these things. Same for hospital management. Same for law enforcement and local government. No doubt some of this starts to fall apart at the rank and file level, for instance a local fire station, but it's not hard stuff to teach, really. And bootstrapping people into the system is not hard. Every time someone reaches a net controller, or an ARC or FEMA mission physically touches some important point, like a hospital, or gets a cell phone to work and calls into higher authority for direction, that information can and should be conveyed.

Sure, throw a satphone at somebody that is not properly provisioned, or not labeled with a number, or that comes with no useful phone numbers to dial on it, yes, it's a brick. But bricks are simple. Instead of trying to fix the hard stuff, like how to deploy more HF operators, fix the easy stuff, fix the bricks. More satphones, more documentation and training to go with the satphones. Hell, one laminated 8.5x11 inch "hard card" with "stand outside, point it like this, charge it like that" on one side and telephone numbers and key telecon date/time information on the other and even if you can only get into one out of every three telecons per day you are cooking with gas! And the reality is they really do work better than that.

FWIW, my employer (a large telco) was/is down there replacing broken fiber/copper links with small, transportable Earth stations.  That's kind of our bread and butter up here in AK and why we were asked to put together a team to go down to PR and build a bunch of them and put them on the air.  They built a temporary gateway Earth station in San Juan somewhere, and then went out and set up these transportables at various cell sites (and other places too?) to get them back operating at a somewhat normal capacity.  We do it all the time up here in the bush and it works very well if you've got a sat transponder to point it at.  My employer happens to have access to a spare bird or a bunch of transponders (I wasn't on that crew, I'm making some educated guesses) so that was that.

I would guess the problem with FEMA or ARC doing the same thing probably comes down to money and transponder access.  The Earth station hardware isn't insanely expensive (by telecom standards), but building 10 or 20 or more of them for future emergency use would be cost prohibitive for most organizations.  The bigger problem would be satellite access.  Unless you had some deals in place with some commercial operators, you'd be sitting on a lot of useless hardware when the shit hit the fan.  The company I work for happens to own and lease a bunch of birds so it can be flexible when it needs to.

As an aside, I'm still waiting to hear whether my team will be going, and when.  We're going to be building out a new microwave network, or replacing a destroyed one.  There seems to be some corporate feet-dragging, or some kind of bureaucratic stalling going on.  I'm pretty much in the dark for now.

There were a great number of things that we take for granted that were simply unavailable or unplanned for down there. At my work, we have telecons all the time, we have video webinars and working group meetings with multiple video streams going, we live by our Outlook calendars, and get/send 20-50 emails a day. We also have our cell phones which often times are synched to our work. Just a little thing like sending out a meeting notice was a royal pain, even for the folks that had satcom. For me, they'd issued me a FEMA e-mail address and a FEMA iPhone to read it with. Never read it the whole time I was there because I'd forgotten the password and couldn't find their IT folks that could reset it. Again, first world problems. None of that matters to you and your neighbors when the only road to get to or from your neighborhood has the bridge washed out.

Each of these wireless modalities (satphone, satcom, HF, VHF/UHF, cell, AREDN, etc.) has both strengths and weaknesses. However, having the diversity in comm channels makes you and any organization you belong to more robust in the face of damage to your regular infrastructure. As hams, part of what I think we need to be doing is "educating" (maybe not the right word) emergency management at the local, state, and national levels on the capabilities we can bring to the table along with other skills.

Great idea! They should have done that on Day 1.

You are thinking too big. All they need are a bunch of Iridium or INMARSAT handsets and they are in business. They don't need to backhaul entire cell sites.

People and money are always the problem, not technology

Yep. I had an engineer as a mentor that had a similar idea. He said that technical problems can always be solved with enough time and money. People problems, not so much.

This is obvious. It's a lot easier to work with machines than people but machines are only as good as people who create and maintain them. Machines always seem to fail at the worst time. IMHO, those who rely on machines 100% and have no backup plan(s) are destined to fail miserably. Throwing money at the problem does not always work either but it seems to be the way the government wants to fix most problems. Human factor can't be discounted and has always been underestimated.
This thread is very valuable. We can sit here and talk about what would have worked better or worse. Hindsight is always 20/20. The fact is that nothing ever works out as intended, in similar situations. You've been there and learned a lot of valuable lessons. Thank you for sharing with us. Human behavior has very similar patterns, no matter if this happened in Puerto Rico, Namibia or US of A. We can learn from history and hopefully apply the knowledge to be better prepared.

Many thanks to the OP for all the great info!  Awesome thread and important discussion (especially SATCOM vs. HF; solar charging).

Honestly I see utility in having both SATCOM and HF.  This adds to the resiliency of COMMS in a whole variety of circumstances.

From what I'm reading about MARS, the Navy-Marine Corps MARS was shutdown in September 2015, and NG-to-civilian interoperability MARS was terminated in May 2015.  Hopefully the situation in PR shows that HF still has an important place in emergency communications.

I would hate to be in a major disaster or under attack from a foreign enemy where SATCOM is down/saturated and no functional HF was available.  I'm certainly glad things didn't get that severe here in Texas after Hurricane Harvey.

God Bless planemaker!

If you have an hour to kill, free free to watch the presentation <some random dude that has no relationship to Planemaker> made to our local EMCOMM ham group:



ETA: Persec and all.

@planemaker--one key question on a subject that none of your AAR's or <that guy > ever covered: in the 5 weeks you were on the island, how much traffic did you actually pass? How many total messages?

I was running about 4-5 a day so not very many. My team mate was doing maybe a little more since he had a pactor modem. There were days when we'd get or send 1 or 2 in the morning and then spend the rest of the day doing field work or helping one of the other relief work teams with a communications problem. In a way, I'm glad we didn't get tasked with a whole lot of messages to pass because we found it was very slow to do it via HF. We became the defacto comm leads for pretty much any comms question anybody had so that consumed a goodly percentage of time as well. Trying to find a technical solution to the noise problem took up a LOT of time and we never really solved it to any significant degree. We just couldn't pinpoint a single source because I don't think there was just one, there were many that all added up. We also spent some time doing field assessments and doing re-supply/help missions for our team mates.

I would imagine that had we been on the ground on Day 1 rather than Day 21, the story would have been significantly different.

One addition to the discussion on satcom. I heard an interesting factoid regarding one of the satellite providers. They indicated that pre-storm, there was something like 10 users that used less than 60 minutes a day combined. In contrast, the heavy load time used 16,000 minutes a day from over 1500 users. So, if you think that your backup should be satcom, consider that may be everyone else's backup plan too and that saturation will occur, rendering your backup useless. It happened here with the cell network right after an earthquake. Too many users crash the system that's designed for a statistically small percentage of the total subscriber base being active at any one given time.

I remember that. I was in Richmond. No calls went thru for a couple of hours on Verizon Wireless.

Interestingly, texts did fine.

And this is why Iridium was the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. I suspect the actual, double secret probation, dark government, alien conspiracy business plan was to build it, go bankrupt, and ruin the investors. Interestingly, it became a HUGE win for Uncle Sam. When they bailed it out it was only for operating costs. They got a worldwide satcom system for nearly free, something they desperately needed since UHF satcom was, and remains in, tatters.

Those numbers leave me completely unimpressed with respect to its load on the system, and VERY impressed with respect to the system's ability compared to HF.

I don't know if those numbers are Iridium, INMARSAT, other services, or all three, but let's just pretend it's Iridium alone. I don't have the current performance numbers for Iridium, but back in 2000'ish it was 80 simultaneous calls per spot beam. I'm pretty sure it's better than that today (and will be WAY better than that as the Iridium Next constellation goes on-line, they are about halfway into replacing the constellation and should be done next year). Those 16000 minutes translate into only an average of 33 simultaneous users per minute based on an 8 hour day. While no doubt call completion rates and call drop rates were nowhere near perfect, and certainly frustrating for people who are used to the reliability of a functioning cellular phone system, the ability to place calls themselves with FAR more reliability and FAR less latency (which is often measured in hours for HF due to propagation and backlogs) than an HF delivered message, at rates FAR above what HF is capable of, without having to have experts set up and operate a radio station for them, and without having to interact with and logistically support those experts, puts "unreliable", "overloaded" Iridium (and INMARSAT, how many calls did they handle?) head and shoulders above HF. I mean, seriously, they logged 16,000 minutes of voice traffic for over 1500 users. That's over 266 hours of voice traffic. Per day. I bet HF moved probably the equivalent of 1% of that per day.

Unless the End Times come and the satellite systems are no more, sat is where it's at! And sat just keeps getting better. I wrote off ham radio to save my ass a long time ago. I went sat: PLB and inReach.

If they grabbed every ham radio operator that showed up on the island, took away his radio, gave him an L-band sat device of some sort (Iridium, INMARSAT, whatever), their phone number, the phone number of someplace to get more numbers, and let him keep all of his other cool-guy stuff like LiFePo power packs, laptops, and solar chargers, they'd have moved a shit-ton more traffic than what they all did with HF.

What was left unsaid was that there were four times as many users who were <trying> to use the system and couldn't. Meaning, only a quarter of those who were counting on the satcom to be functional actually were able to get a call thru <at all>. HF sucks rocks for data traffic, at least from all that I've seen. Voice traffic via HF, though, was and is perfectly usable by a very large number of people simultaneously. On the other hand, my teammate's experience with his Iridium phone was far less than 1/3 functionality. His experience was more the norm. So, no, satphone didn't pass as much voice traffic as radio in general.

The satcom data providers were also getting saturated at a prodigious rate. And, as they approached their saturation, the bandwidth for any one user became less and less with collisions going up exponentially. Did I mention how many times <no one> in the Branch office had internet even with multiple satcom providers/dishes? And, during and right after the hurricane, no one was able to use satcom data because they had taken down their dishes in advance of the storm - a very prudent precaution in this case. (Some of the smaller BGAN-like terminals didn't take very long to put back up, though. Big dishes did.)

Satellite and HF each have a place in the arsenal of emcomm and neither is a panacea, as reality has clearly shown. I plan on using the ARFCOM way: get both!

Spoke with a Puerto Rican ham on the air last night. He'd gotten power back a little over 2 weeks ago. So, 2.5 months without power. He was running 100W into a regular dipole. Another PR ham came in to speak with him in Spanish. My Spanish isn't all that great but I gather the other guy was still running on generator to charge batteries and using an inverter. So, 3 months with no power. I think they were only 10 miles apart with the first guy closer to the town of Arecibo.

BTW, I'm working on a "new-and-improved" packing list for my own needs. If anybody is interested, I could try to figure out Dropbox or google docs and put it there for folks to download for themselves.

For folks that have done Field Day, POTA or some other remote, austere work, was their anything missing in my existing list that came to mind as a "gotta have"?

Gonna weld up anything to take with you next time?  Something handy to have?

Probably. With the starter kit you thoughtfully provided, I've added "Learn to weld" to my short list of New Year's resolutions.

This weekend I'm planning to check out my new mast. It's the Packtenna 32ft. mast. Thing is, the top piece is just a hollow tube about 1/4" in diameter. So, if I want an eyelet there, I'll have to epoxy one in. The MFJ mast I took to PR had an eyelet already. This new mast may end up having more flex than the MFJ one as well. This is what the MFJ one looked like on the roof of the building I was at in Ponce:



Suffice to say, I wouldn't hang too much on either one and expect it to remain vertical. Probably if we'd been able to put the inverted Vs one on each side, it would have been better. No room at the inn, unfortunately.

I almost goofed & lost your address.  Enjoy having the heaviest AR @ the range!

Bump cuz I dont want to loose my bookmark to this thread yet.

Great talk in Richmond today!  I knew I had heard some of the information somewhere before (nice shout out to this site).

When you finish your new packing list, I would love to get a copy.

That's OK, I do the same thing.

BTW, my presentation went well today. Also, it was recorded. There was a guy there from FCC who indicated that he and on other guy are the only hams he knows of in the office. He also said we should comment on the FCC's request for public comments on emconn. Once I get the particulars (which I can't remember but will be on the video), I'll pass the word along.

Found it!:

Edit to make hot: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-17-1180A1.pdf