W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

Washtenaw Skywarn net recap 2021-06-12

Steve W8AYN ran the Washtenaw Skywarn net using the WD8EOC call sign on Saturday 12 June 2021. The net started at just before 8:00 p.m. when the National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm warning for the county, and continued until just before 9:15 p.m when the warning was allowed to expire.

Reports from the radio and from Twitter were primarily of sporadic hail, anywhere from pea sized to quarter sized, running from Dexter to Scio Twp to southwest and west Ann Arbor. There were no high winds reported.

This storm started near Lansing and tracked to the southeast at about 20 mph. The bigger hail reports were further to the north, including reports from Laingsburg and Ovid in Shiawassee County.

More storm details from IEM.

Some useful Twitter accounts this season include

• NWS Detroit
• IEMbot DTX
• Anthony D. Torres
• Nick Dewhirst

plus the usual Ann Arbor weather chatter, which mostly discusses the famed Ann Arbor Weather Shield.

Skywarn monitor: W5US Wichita County TX 146.94

Monitoring the Wichita County TX Skywarn on the evening of Friday, May 22 2020. The Wichita Falls, TX area is under a Severe Thunderstorm Warning until 8 PM CDT, with 60 MPH wind gusts and tennis ball size hail possible. A report was called in at 2052 Eastern of ping-pong sized hail along I-44.

579 listeners are tracking this rebroadcast on Broadcastify as of 2112 Eastern. "This broadcast will be on the W5US 146.940 Skywarn Repeater used by trained spotters covering Wichita and Archer county in Texas. This repeater is active during all significant weather events that occur in the area."

Local broadcast TV coverage includes KAUZ Newschannel 6.

A 2019 Times Record News story has photos of Charlie W5GPO and his shack with radar and radios showing his net control station. W5GPO was net control for tonight's net up until 2116 Eastern.

In a 2016 blog from Jay W9LW there is discussion of a decision to close this net during severe weather, making it only available to members of the local ARES group. A further update regarding that controversy was a signal from the Texas ARES coordinator that all ARES nets in that state were to be conducted on frequencies open to all licensed amateurs. The concern was for storm chasers not local to the area pursuing tornadoes for fun and profit, and interrupting safety-related efforts. I was not able to determine the current status of this dispute, but there was no sign of any conflict on tonight's net.

A Terrible Tuesday in 1979 is the subject of an audiobook. "A recording of the actual radio transmissions of members of the Wichita County Amateur Radio Emergency Service, operating as SKYWARN Storm Spotters, during the large tornado that struck Wichita Falls, Texas, on April 10, 1979."

Skywarn net report, 2020-04-07 evening

Skywarn activated on the N8DUY repeater for a thunderstorm with some hail reports. At 2134 the net control was getting frequent reports of pea-sized hail, so much so that they asked reporters to focus on nickel-sized hail or better. The net stayed condition green the entire time, until the storms passed out of Washtenaw County at about 2200. I checked out at 2213, and the net closed at 2221.

The most notable reports were as follows:

At 2123, a report of a minute of 3/4 inch hail at Textile Rd and Whittaker Rd, Ypsilanti Twp.

At 2019, Jeff KN8A reports nickel size hail at Stofer + Island Lk Road, Dexter Twp. Road covered with hail.

Video: M-52, 2 miles north of I-94 via Tom Gunnells via Twitter.

Steve W8AYN was net control. Summary: lots of checkins (34), lots of pea sized hail reports. Net closed at 2221. Weather was "enhanced risk". WD8EOC station monitored from the county and related reports to and from NWS.

A fox hunt for location of QRM was called for after the net completed.

At its peak I saw 45 stations listening to the Broadcastify relay of the N8DUY repeater that carries Washtenaw Skywarn nets.

Washtenaw County EOC will cancel its scheduled Skywarn test net, since this actual net was sufficient to test handling of lots of traffic.

2020 Washtenaw County siren testing season - April 4 station report

As previously, the Washtenaw County Michigan EOC test county warning sirens monthly on the first Saturday of the month during the spring, summer, and fall months. I was home monitoring the net for this session, both via RF on the 145.15- N8DUY repeater (PL 100), as well as via the Broadcastify relay feed.

Of the reports I heard, one siren was in need of maintenance, and I did not copy the location of that siren. In addition, one operator N8ZLR had problems with transmission, able to key the repeater but with no audio; that was fixed by the end of the net.

I joke (ha ha only serious) that one other reason to run nets like these is for it to be the "fix your radio hour". Amateur radio almost always has some opportunity to improve your radio skills, whether that be diagnosing a problem over the air, tuning up an antenna or finding a better design or higher ground to mount it, or locating just the right gear and band and time slot that has other people listening on the other end.

For more info on the siren test, see the Washtenaw siren test web page maintained by the county.

Using ham radio traffic to trigger "wake words" with voice recognition

Opsgenie has an interesting post up about using the Amazon stack including a transcription service to decode amateur radio traffic and send alerts. In the post entitled Convert Radio Waves to Alerts using SDR, AWS Lambda and Amazon Transcribe, Farhi Yardimci uses ham2mon and a stack of AWS services to recognize the words "red" and "blue" in transcribed speech and generate Opsgenie alerts from them.

In thinking about this stack, it's impressive that it can be done, and somewhat expensive if you have a lot of traffic to monitor. The listening device has to transfer all of its data up to AWS for processing, with the attendant costs and lag.

As a comparison in design, it's worth considering taking the general purpose voice recognition back end and replacing it with a very small model tuned to a specific "wake word" that could run on the device with no added need for external processing. The useful version of this I could imagine would be a system listening to the local Skywarn channel triggering only on the word "Skywarn". If it was trained on some actual traffic, it should wake up during severe weather as well as during the weekly practice nets.

Some tooling that looks promising, at least to start from:

porcupine, from Picovoice, which has some built in wake-words and can be trained from a console

precise from Mycroft AI, which is open source

Hackaday has some videos of the porcupine demo, which will run in as little as 512KB of memory.

Operating notes: Nagoya NA-771 antenna, Washtenaw Skywarn

The stock antenna on my Baofeng UV-5R stopped working just before a vacation trip up north. This got in the way of operating in the Upper Peninsula, which I had been looking forward to. Oh well, several the repeaters up there have Echolink, so any time I want to tune in I can, as long as I have wifi or cell data coverage. I didn't go on the air while I was there, though I did monitor one conversation (about snowmobiling).

I've replaced the Baofeng's antenna with a Nagoya NA-771. It's quite a bit longer than the original equipment, so much so that it just barely fits in my bookbag. It still does fit, though, and that means I can still carry a radio around with me anywhere. I haven't done exhaustive trials of performance but it's clearly better that I had been getting before, and overall I'm happy with the switch to a new antenna.

It was a busy night tonight on the N8DUY 145.15 repeater as storms blew through the area causing widespread power outages and lots of talk on the Skywarn net. Even though there was a lot of static, I still was able to hear the talk on the air and relay reports from trained spotters to Twitter. (I'm not a trained spotter yet - yet! - so I didn't check in to the net.)

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