Hey everyone, KE0LMZ here!
As you may know, I’m in charge of handling the Region A Healthcare Net every month. This net happens on the third Wednesday of every month on the Warrensburg repeater at 9:30 am. As the Region A Healthcare Net coordinator, I keep track of who runs the nets, who checks in, and whether they’re with a healthcare facility or not; I then give this information to people on healthcare-related calls that are from all around Region A.
This month decided to throw a curveball at me to make sure that I could improvise, adapt, and overcome.
I initially planned to run the Region A Healthcare Net myself this month. When I went to my mom’s Yaesu FT-991A radio, I found that I couldn’t switch over to the Warrensburg repeater. I turned the dial that was supposed to change the memorized channels, but all it did was adjust the squelch. Since I’ve never had this problem before, I freaked out.
The first thing I did was to send a message to my backup/relay station, Robert Fleming KE0AVT, and let him know that I was having radio troubles and needed him to take the net. With that resolved, I went back to pressing buttons on the radio and calling Roger Henley KD0WXT (my stepdad who is better at radio hardware and programming than I am) to help me find the problem and fix it.
Before Roger got home to help me fix the radio, I managed to knock the frequency close enough to the Warrensburg repeater that I could hear the net. I heard Robert working with Kristl Thompson KR1STL to run it smoothly and keep track of the check-ins from healthcare facilities and normal stations.
When Roger got home, we came to the conclusion that the squelch button was accidentally pressed at some point between the antenna getting hooked up and me getting my hands on the radio that morning. He showed me how to switch back to the memory channels, and I was able to properly get to the Warrensburg repeater and formally check in myself and the rest of my family.
I wanted to tell this story to let people know that there’s always something you can learn (in my case, how to get back to the memory channels), that radios aren’t infallible (but can usually be fixed), and that it’s always good to have a backup station.
Thank you so much to Robert Fleming KE0AVT for being able to take the net and make sure that the show would go on, to Kristl Thompson KR1STL for jumping in as a relay station and sending the log to me afterwards, and to Roger Henley KD0WXT for helping me get back on the air and showing me a new thing about the radio that I didn’t know.
73 everybody!
KE0LMZ, clear.
Benton County, Missouri ARES 