Saturday, September 16th, the Logan City 911 Center completed a test of the Code Red notification system. Emergency alert services are a great way to receive notifications when an emergency occurs, therefore, if you did not receive the notification, I encourage each of you to sign up for future alerts using this link: Code Red Alerts.
Once on the linked website, there is a brief description of the service and a clickable button to open the screen where you can enter your location and notification options. There is also an app for push notifications for mobile devices, with the option to pay 99¢ to add weather alert notifications.
The system is geographically based, allowing you to select physical locations you want to be notified for, and you can select text, landline and email alerts for emergencies affecting the physical locations chosen.
Next, some information about the frequency update mentioned last net and detailed in a recent post to the blog.
Over the last few months a push was made in the local amateur community to update the frequency assignments for every city, town and faith based group with an active emergency communications organization. The updates have been attached to the Cache County Emergency Communications Plan, allowing all amateur operators in the valley to see the new assignments, via that document.
During the update process, efforts have been made to more closely follow the Utah Band Plan as it relates to simplex frequencies in the VHF and UHF bands.
As you recall, our primary net frequency was previously adjusted to follow the Utah Band Plan for VHF frequencies. At that time I did not review the band plan for UHF frequencies, where I would have noticed a change was also needed there.
To correct that oversight, the UHF frequency for our net will adjust to 446.500 MHz. I did not get this message out to the net members until I emailed the link to the blog post on September 10, therefore I propose we make the change between the September and October net meetings, and begin using this new frequency as the cross-band repeat transmit frequency for the October 15th net meeting.
For the amateur operators working with the Newton EOC, we now have frequencies assigned to the EOC that will be presented at the meeting on the 21st.
As we move to make this change, if I can help with programming of radios I would be happy to do so. I have software and cables for Kenwood TMD700, many of the Baofeng handheld radios and some of the Anytone mobile radio models.