KC0QLU met with hospital staff, and 2 prospective hams at the Harrison County Community Hospital in Bethany, MO Saturday Nov. 12th 2011. In attendace were: KC0QLU Trevor, WK0Q Allen, KD0ISZ Alicia, KD0ITK Marcene, Chris, and Melissa. Topics were narrowbanding, repeater use, antenna needs for the hospital, and starting a simplex net in the area. The group has been meeting monthly for a while now and hopes to expand the number of operators in that area. They are looking to have a ham class after the first of the year and have asked the NWMO ARES Group to provide that training. The NWMO ARES Group assisted the hospital with the installation of a ham station for emergency communications in 2010 and are hoping to expand in the area.

The NWMO ARES Group will have it’s monthly meeting this Thursday 9/8/2011 7pm at the Plattsburg Fire station. We will discuss the upcoming hamfest as well as other items for the group.

Reminder that the monthly business meeting is this Saturday 9am at the
Cameron Public Safety Building in Cameron, MO. Everyone is welcome, we
have alot to discuss(hamfest, secretary position, insurance, ECHOLINK,
Region net, Hospital projects, etc.) Also there have been a couple
ARES® appointments in region H as well.

Hope to see you there!

The NTS Message Handling Class held during the NWMOARES monthly meeting on Saturday, February 12 was an overwhelming success. 17 people participated in the class. Everyone in the class generated a NTS message to be sent via existing nets to a recipient.

Phones and Internet were knocked out at approx. 2:30pm. Area most affected was the city of Plattsburg and areas immediately surrounding Plattsburg.Request for possible assistance with relays of emergency traffic was received from the EMD in Cameron, MO at 4:00pm. KC0YEJ started calling members of the group in the surrounding communities to be on standby and to monitor the Plattsburg repeater for any assignments. YEJ also made general calls on the repeater. 5 members of the NWMO ARES® Group were standing by to assist if needed. At 9:30pm phones and internet were back on and the members were released from standby operations.

This type of call out was interesting due to the fact that no phones or internet were available to over half of the group. KC0YEJ did a great job of finding operators outside of the affected area. The area was relatively small but affected the Clinton County Dispatch center and 911 calls. All Sheriff's traffic was being handled thru the city of Cameron PD. No traffic was handled by the NWMO ARES® Group.

Total man hours: 5 x 7hrs = 35 man hours