@57Nomad wrote:
With Hurricane Irma breathing down our necks, being in Tropical Storm Warning zone by Saturday morning, and under Hurricane Warnings by Saturday afternoon, we here in North Florida will undoubtedly be without power by Sunday morning. And prior to that, what with the heavy cloud cover, we will be without satellite communication/reception by Saturday afternoon - definitely by Saturday night.
It's was an interesting weekend, Governor Scott ordered a mandantory evacuation for East Hendry County for Friday at 8:00AM, including the area I live in, I having no interest in evacuating over a CAT 3 storm got the shutters up took down the HughsNet antenna and set the genertor to standby.
On Wednesday the EOC went to level 1 (full operation) and the powers to be decided they had everything under control and advised the volunteers (local Ham's) our services would not be needed.
Saturday with the storm bearing down on Hendry, the EOC put out a message seeking volunteers to work Net Control and to staff the shelters, we managed to scrape up 5 bodies, one for Net Control, three for shelters and myself doing storm tracking and forecasting.
The county lucked out as the 800MHz system they relied on for communications failed and we became the counties only form of communications for first responders.
On Monday we began digging out, there's no power out here so ADSL is down Century Link's RT's are DOA and my cellular backup was running at dial-up speeds, I reinstalled my HughsNet antenna and it linked up and has been working flawlessly ever since.
I have been monitoring our repeaters and taking calls from Hams around Hendry and Lee as to where where gas can be found and have been pushing that information out over our maillist, so yes internet here is a necessity and i am damm glad I signed up with HughesNet as a backup plan a few weeks ago, because without it I would be dead in the water and screwed good as I work from home and need internet to do my job and to help out our community too.
