I’ve been a bit slow in posting about Field Day, partly because I spent most of Sunday catching up on sleep, worked all day Monday, finished the Field Day video Tuesday night, and still haven’t started editing the still photos. Anyways… I produced a short video again this year of things happening at our Field Day site. The Vimeo video is embedded above, and is also available in sub-optimal quality at YouTube. I think I still like last year’s video better, but I was able to get set-up and antenna raising into the video this year.

The 2010 W0AK Field Day went really well. I ended up at the site at about 10 a.m. Saturday morning to help set up. Station set-up was well underway by the time I had arrived, and the antenna raising was about to commence. It was a hot and sticky day — about 90 degrees with a heat index just shy of 100.

PowerFilm Solar set up their 1 kW military-grade Solar Shade the night before, and a storm had blown through the area at about 5:30 a.m. Saturday, and boy I really underestimated the strength of that structure. It stood up to about 60 mph winds without even batting an eye.

The Solar Shade powered pretty much everything except the logging computers without a hiccup. The solar power was stored in two 120 Ah Humvee batteries, which were more than enough for our needs. Having such a unique, huge structure there for solar power gave us great talking points with visitors to our Field Day site.

We had two dignitaries visit us on Saturday from served agencies (which scored us extra points!): Joyce Flinn, the Readiness and Response Bureau Chief for the Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division; and Lt. Col. Kevin Plagman of the Iowa National Guard. Both took a tour of the Field Day site and learned the purpose and goals of the Field Day event, and then visited with operators.

Unfortunately, as in years past, Field Day was competing with other major events in the Des Moines metro area — this year it was the USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships at Drake and the Des Moines Arts Festival downtown, so it’s difficult for amateur radio to compete with these events for news coverage. I did a phone interview with WHO Newsradio 1040 Friday morning but I didn’t get a chance to listen to see if we made the cut.

After dinner, I sat down at our 15m sideband station and called CQ for about an hour and a half, making just over 100 contacts, mostly with stations on the east coast that were booming into Iowa.

At about 2:30 a.m. a storm began to approach our location. There was plenty of lightning to our north and northwest, rendering the bands more useless as they came closer. Eventually the gust front blew through, we gave up with the static, disconnected and powered off, and covered the stations with plastic sheeting before retreating to our cars where most of us took naps until the storm left the area at 5 a.m. Luckily everything stayed dry, but the lightning now to our south was still making the bands too noisy to do any meaningful operating. The air cooled down by a brisk 20 degrees by 5 a.m. — a welcome change from the 90-degree temperatures we had been experiencing late in the week.

With the breakfast crew’s arrival soon after the storm, I decided it was time for me to throw in the towel for the night and go home to get some sleep.

I had made the goal for our Field Day to reach 1,000 contacts this year after making 915 last year. Even with the thunderstorms disrupting the event for a good 4 hours, we accomplished this goal and made 1036 contacts. The only mode that we suffered a decrease of contacts in was PSK31 — last year we made 1 PSK contact, and this year we made none — a sharp decline from last year! Okay, maybe it’s just one contact… but still…

Field Day is the last major event for my club until the chili feed and auction around Thanksgiving time — but planning has already started for next year’s Field Day. In the past year, there’s been a push to move out of our comfort zone at Big Creek State Park, where we’ve held the event for years, to a new, more urban location. We looked at moving the event this year but it didn’t pan out. We are compiling a list of possible locations for next year, and will be narrowed down in the coming months before further planning.

Currently, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office leases airtime on the 700/800 MHz RACOM network, while the Polk County Fire Department (made of rural departments that are dispatched by PCSO) resides on conventional VHF frequencies that are then patched to the RACOM network.

The “Assistance to Firefighters” FEMA grant would allow the county to purchase roughly 116 mobile radios, along with 217 handhelds. A decision on the grant is expected by late May. Polk County would have one year to formalize the purchase and that would allow the county to select a new radio system.

Without the text of the grant application, it is unclear whether Polk County Fire would directly join the RACOM network or create a new standalone interoperable system, although reports surfaced earlier this year of a request for proposals (RFP) for a new, leased countywide P25 fire radio system. Westcom and Des Moines will have the option to join the project.

Ankeny Fire was selected to file the proposal, as Polk County was not allowed to apply for the FEMA grant. If the grant is approved, Ankeny, Polk City, Elkhart, Saylor and Delaware townships, Altoona, Bondurant, Granger, Grimes, Johnston, Mitchellville, Pleasant Hill, Runnells and Windsor Heights would benefit from the grant.

Operating under the lights overnight at the Jollyboat Shelter at Big Creek State Park near Polk City, Iowa, for the 2009 W0AK Field Day.

Again this year I will be operating under the callsign W0AK for this year’s DMRAA/ARTS Field Day that will be based at Big Creek State Park near Polk City, Iowa (just outside of Des Moines). I will be mostly operating during the overnight hours, since my girlfriend will be home from 9-land for the weekend from her clinical rotation… she’s demanding attention even though it’s Field Day weekend! The nerve!

There’s been a lot of shop talk about what equipment everyone will be using and what class. W0AK (along with the GOTA station W0SCI) will be operating Class 2A, Iowa — same as last year. We may not be totally on battery power, since we will have one or two Flex SDR machines that seem to be happier on AC mains.

1 kW Power Shade by PowerFilm Solar

PowerFilm Solar, based just north of us in Ames, is graciously donating a 1 kW military-grade Solar Shade which is basically a large tent with flexible solar panels. I can’t wait to show it off. We’re still deciding on what will be put underneath the Power Shade, our operating area or the welcome area. The solar panels will be used to charge the batteries used for the radios.

Two generators will power the logging PC’s, lights, and the coffee pot. The generators will be a 3 kW EU3000I and a 2 kW EU3000I.

The radios and antennas may consist of (rough plan):

• Flex SDR
• Kenwood TS-690SAT
• Kenwood TS-850
• Yaesu FT-100
• Whatever other radios people want to bring out
• Two masts/rotators/controllers, with 200′ control line
• Carolina Windom
• Ladder line
• G5RV
• Buddipole (6m)
• Some random antennas and towers from the NWS station

I feel pretty confident that our club has come up with a very good operating plan. Last year we made just shy of 1,000 QSO’s, and I’m hoping that we can break that number. Looks like the weather in central Iowa will cooperate for Field Day activities, which is a much-needed reprieve from the daily heavy rainfall we’ve been receiving.

If you’re in the Des Moines area, please do come out to our Field Day site to see what the DMRAA is all about. It doesn’t cost a thing, and there will be free food! Operating activities start at 1 p.m. Saturday and goes until 1 p.m. Sunday. We will also be holding a potluck supper on Saturday at about 5 p.m. For a map and directions, visit the W0AK Field Day website.

At last year’s W0AK Field Day I decided on a whim to produce a short video with only my Nikon Coolpix P3. It mostly focuses on the ambience and atmosphere of the operation aspect of it. This year I think I’m going to do the same, but hopefully catch some of the setup and some time with dignataries that we have invited. The only thing I’m grimacing about for this year’s video is the audio quality. For a point-and-shoot, the P3′s video quality is very decent (YouTube’s converting lost most of the quality though) but the audio is downright crap, so it’ll be difficult to do interviews or sound bites. I wouldn’t mind receiving a loaner 5D Mk III though…

Iowa is no exception, as my local ham club received a copy of the Iowa proclamation last week. The proclamation will be on display at the W0AK Field Day site at Big Creek State Park, near Polk City.

The text of the proclamation reads as the following:

WHEREAS, the State recognizes the services amateur radio operators provide to our many emergency response organizations, including FEMA, DHS, and Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management; and

WHEREAS, these same individuals have further demonstrated their value in public assistance by providing free radio communications for local parades, bike-a-thons, walk-a-thons, fairs and other charitable public events; and

WHEREAS, the State of Iowa recognizes and appreciates the diligence of these “hams” who also serve as weather spotters in the Skywarn program of the National Weather Service; and

WHEREAS, amateur radio once again proved its undisputed relevance in the modern world in 2005 by providing emergency communications when other systems failed in the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the USA and in the tsunami catastrophe overseas; and

WHEREAS, these amateur radio services are provided wholly uncompensated; and

WHEREAS, the ARRL is the leading organization for amateur radio in the USA; and

WHEREAS, the ARRL Field Day exercise will take place on June 26-27 and is a 24-hour emergency encampment exercise and demonstration of the Radio Amateurs’ skills and readiness to provide self-supporting communications even in fields without further infrastructure:

NOW, THEREFORE, I, Chester J. Culver, Governor of the State of Iowa, do hereby proclaim the week of June 20-26, 2010 as Amateur Radio Week in Iowa.

Already there’s a thread over at RadioReference with a pretty decent chunk of talkgroups figured out. If you’ve been listening to the system, collaborate and share your notes with others. Talkgroups can be figured out by running Unitrunker or by just listening.

If you’re interested, Johnson County EMA will be holding an open house of the JECC on June 19th from 1 to 3 p.m. The JECC is located at 4529 Melrose Avenue in Iowa City. More information can be found on this PDF flier.

Since Field Day is probably the biggest event year after year for most clubs, it requires a lot of help and a lot of logistical planning and general forethought for it to be pulled off without a hitch. Some ham groups tend to not be very organized, and/or they don’t move swiftly and efficiently at putting together a plan of attack and then setting it into motion.

So, it’s no surprise that it brings some clubs great consternation when it’s time to request help and resources from their membership. A lot of clubs have memberships that have become complacent with having everything fed to them with no participation required.

Luckily, my amateur radio club doesn’t have this problem. Tom, the president, says “participation breeds participation” — we have a board that is highly active in the central Iowa amateur radio community, and we get input from members on what presentations they would like to see at general meetings.

Or perhaps it’s because “participation” and “volunteering” isn’t heard just around Field Day — we request it year-round in a multitude of ways. One way is to have “show and tell” as a part of some of our general meetings. If we’re doing a presentation on homebrew, then we’d like for our members to bring their homemade trinkets to the meeting to talk about them and share their knowledge.

We recently had our annual hamfest at the Iowa State Fairgrounds, and we couldn’t have done it without the help of our members. Because of this, our hamfest is likely the largest gathering of the amateur radio community in the state of Iowa. Big enough, in fact, that we will have to move to a much larger venue next year.

Because of these constant, yet subtle, expectations of participation and leadership, It’s never a surprise to our members when we ask our members for help in putting together the W0AK Field Day. Our members see the value in providing help to the hamfest — and other club events and projects — they see the success grow year after year, and it truly does show that “participation breeds participation.”

Eerie magenta-tinted clouds cover the community of Parkersburg, Iowa, after a tornado demolished the southern third of the town on Sunday, May 25, 2008. (Kevin Sanders/AP)

It was Sunday, May 25, 2008 — the day before Memorial Day — when I was on my way back home from the campus of Iowa State University when I got the call.

“There’s been a tornado in northeast Iowa. A pretty big one,” the Associated Press staffer told me on the telephone. As a photo stringer for the AP Des Moines bureau, I had become accustomed to being sent into areas around the state that had just been hit by a tornado. It wasn’t uncommon to do two or three of these assignments each year.

I hung up the phone and started getting my gear together immediately. I got my cameras and lenses together and packed an extra change of clothes. I hopped on the computer and googled where the town of Parkersburg was and how long it would take to get there.

Thinking this would be a routine tornado assignment, I went out the door in about 15 minutes and jumped on Interstate 35 and headed north towards US Highway 20. Once on US Highway 20 near Steamboat Rock, I saw towering stormclouds due east. As I got closer and closer to Parkersburg, I was encountering entire convoys of electric utility contractor trucks and trucks hauling heavy equipment.

As the sun went down and twilight set in, I left Highway 20 and got on Iowa Highway 14, the final leg to Parkersburg. Already, the road and ditches were lined with debris and downed electric poles. Another line of storms had moved in and began dumping heavy rain and nickel-sized hail. The conditions were so poor that it forced me to stop and pull over onto the shoulder halfway down the road from Parkersburg.

After the rain let up, I continued further north on Highway 14. I approached the state trooper blocking the road into Parkersburg, identified myself, and he let me pass. I took a left onto Iowa Highway 57, the main southernmost road in Parkersburg. I stopped a few blocks down and parked the car, gathered up my equipment out of the backseat and continued on foot.

As I stopped to take a look around me and size up the situation, I couldn’t help but be a little spooked by the silhouettes of splintered, barren trees and collapsed buildings against the magenta-tinted sky. It was truly an unforgettable feeling that still puts pits in my stomach to this day.

A firefighter searches what's left of homes and businesses for victims. (Kevin Sanders/AP)

The entire southern half of Parkersburg had been evacuated, and only first responders were in the area. Police and firefighters were still searching the collapsed structures for any survivors or victims. Heavy machinery and generators were the only things that could be heard in the background. As the daylight quickly gave way to darkness, I had only seen one section of the destruction before I determined it was too dark to work safely. I left Parkersburg that night to crash at Matthew’s house, a friend that worked at the Waterloo Courier as a photographer, who was also covering the disaster.

What I saw that night in Parkersburg — trees stripped bare, pieces of lumber that were lodged in anything and everything after being projectiles in the storm, houses wiped clean off their foundations — was only a small part of the picture and I underestimated the magnitude of the destruction as darkness obscured the disaster area.

The next day — Memorial Day — Matthew and I woke up early and headed out. Matthew went to a neighboring town of Parkersburg, New Hartford, and I went straight to Parkersburg. When I arrived, Iowa Homeland Security was keeping the media out of the area while residents return to their homes to salvage items. Iowa HSEMD’s handling of the media that day is not routine for disaster areas, and it was frustrating for all of us.

Not wasting any time, I began calling around to private aviation contractors in the area to go up and do aerial photos of the town in mourning. Everyone in the area was closed for Memorial Day. Finally, I got lucky with a company I had worked with out of the Ankeny airport near Des Moines when a pilot answered the phone and said he could be in the air in 20 minutes. I arranged for him to meet me at the Waterloo Airport, about a half hour drive for me from Parkersburg.

When I arrived at the Waterloo Airport, I discovered that they were actually clipped by the very same tornado. The airport had minimal damage but no electricity, and no fuel pumps. Thankfully, my plane was able to land and pick me up. We received permission to fly above the no-fly zone that was established around Parkersburg. Less than 5 minutes after landing, we were back in the air and heading west towards Parkersburg.

When we got into the air, the big picture finally became visible. It was impossible to see the magnitude of destruction from the ground. From the air you could certainly see the path that the tornado took. Homes, businesses, trees, and everything else that was upright before the storm was spread out for miles.

A day after the tornado hit, the tornado's path could clearly be seen from the air, looking from the southeast of Parkersburg, Iowa on Monday, May 26, 2008. (Kevin Sanders/AP)

We spent about 20 minutes in the air, shooting at various focal lengths and angles, before returning to the Waterloo Airport. I sat in the lobby of the hangar and edited then filed the pictures before heading back to Parkersburg.

When I arrived back in Parkersburg, the HSEMD lackeys went home and let the media have some elbow room to work on their reports. When I got back in town, people wanted to tell their stories to anyone that wanted to listen.

They told stories about their experience when the tornado passed over the house they have lived in the entire lives, they talked about their faith in God, talked about what they called a near-death experience, told me about how their houses collapsed inwards and fell into the basements and told me what they were praying for as they were in their basements.

But every single resident told me how fortunate they felt that they had early warning for the storm. While still a significant number, only six people died immediately from the EF-5 Parkersburg-New Hartford-Dunkerton tornado and left 70 injuries in its path of destruction.

A resident surveys tornado damage in Parkersburg, Iowa on Monday, May 26, 2008. (Kevin Sanders/AP)

Thanks to Doppler technology and ground-truth spotting, the lead time on the warning was substantial. What would have been the number of fatalities if the National Weather Service couldn’t use these tools to their advantage?

At 4:22 p.m., the first tornado warning went out for the storm. The warning included the cities of Aplington and Parkersburg. The next statement came at 4:46 p.m., warning that the tornado will be near Parkersburg at 5 p.m.

At 4:59 p.m., the tornado started cutting a swath of destruction through the southern half of Parkersburg. Residents had 37 minutes of warning. The tornado continued until just before the Buchanan County line at 5:58 p.m.

Amateur radio was one of the first outside entities to enter Parkersburg. A tornado was first reported as it developed east of Ackley by amateur radio at 4:47 p.m. and the first reports of damage in Parkersburg came into the National Weather Service via amateur radio at 5:01 p.m.

These are the points that I like to tout when I get asked “is amateur radio still relevant?” and if we really need storm spotters out there with modern technology and more high-tech forms of communication.

That fall in 2008, I went and tested for my amateur radio license at Iowa State University on a whim. And I passed. When I was a kid playing with scanners listening to the storm spotters, this was something I wanted to do. In a sense, I think this is something that I felt I had to do for others.

My experience in Parkersburg and other disaster zones I have worked in as a photojournalist has given me a call to serve. I’ve been back to Parkersburg a few times since the tornado hit, and every time I enter the town from the south on Highway 14, when I get to the top of the hill I just get this pit in my stomach, my palms begin to sweat, and everything just comes back to me. My mind replays the image of pulling up into the town in the heavy rain with barren trees and building rubble silhouetted against an oddly pink-colored sky. It’s a feeling like none other.

Not only have I bolstered my emergency preparedness at home, but I now proactively use amateur radio and the latest technology to spot storms, and as cliche as it may sound, but to also keep others safe through the benefit of advance warning. The Parkersburg disaster emphasized the importance of amateur radio’s role in the process of issuing severe weather warnings.

After being elected last month as the president of the Mid-Iowa Skywarn Association, I’ve been working on enhancing the organization to be more connected with spotters and the general public. It’s not a position for me to take lightly, and I take great pride in what I’ve been tasked with. This is only the beginning.

This, of course, meant that there would be new blood coming into those various leadership positions. I am pleased to announce that I was elected through a close write-in vote to serve as the next president of Mid-Iowa Skywarn, which is effective immediately. I am grateful to be elected to this position, and I do indeed have some big shoes to fill and expectations to exceed. I learned this evening that Jim and I have very similar reasons for joining Skywarn, which I will likely write about later down the road. I plan on hitting the ground running, and I have plans to act on. Tom N0VPR was also elected to the role of secretary/treasurer — Tom has been working with Skywarn and ARES for quite a while as well, and we have worked with each other as president/vice president for the local club.

The Mid-Iowa Skywarn Association is the organization that mans the amateur radio station in the Des Moines National Weather Service office, using call sign K0DMX. It takes storm reports from all corners of the NWS Des Moines’ 51-county warning area through an extensive VHF/UHF linked repeater network. We’re lucky to have a great relationship with the Des Moines meteorologist-in-charge and warning coordinator.

After the brief meeting, we moved on to our annual two-hour spotter training class presented by the NWS. It was a great presentation, I thought. It included some new pictures and videos. It was certainly a good crowd, probably more than last year. If maybe a half-dozen more people showed up, we would have run out of seats. A lot of new faces I haven’t seen around — either they are hams that don’t usually come to our “normal” club meetings or this was their first time attending a storm spotter course.

Tom set out some amateur radio information brochures and fliers, along with business cards that listed information about the DMRAA and its meetings. After the presentation, non-hams were mingling with the hams asking how to get involved in amateur radio, and most of those business cards were gone, so I’d say the training session also sparked some interest in amateur radio. It turned out pretty well.

The section of the structure that suffered damage was just recently taken down, and the club produced a time-lapse video of the process on what appears to be a very cold day on the frozen tundra of Dickinson County. It looked like quite a process, and I’m sure the weather made it much more difficult. Thank you, W0DOG, for braving the elements to set the repair process in motion for .61!