6 pm Friday, December 6 to 6 pm Saturday, December 7
In 1999 the US National Weather Service began reaching out to weather spotters across the country to thank them for their volunteer service. NWS offices across the country will once again be opening their offices to amateur radio operators to participate in this great amateur radio event.
Locally, we have made some changes this year. To start, we will be having a Meet and Greet at the NWS office Friday evening Dec. 6 from 6 pm to 8 pm. In addition to amateur radio spotters, we will also look forward to extending an invitation to our emergency management partners that oversee SKYWARN groups in their jurisdiction. It will be a chance to meet the meteorologists as well as each other. In order to properly plan for the number of attendees, we ask that you RSVP with Warning Coordination Meteorologist Steve Runnels by emailing him at steve.runnels@noaa.gov.
In addition, rather than having the HF operating stations at the weather service, we are reaching out to operators across our region to operate and invite spotters in their counties to join the activity. This year there will be stations in Douglas County, Jasper County, Benton County and Greene County. This is a trial to see if we can get more participation from spotters across the region. Next year we hope to rotate those to other counties.
On Friday evening at 6 pm on the WX_TALK Echolink Conference we will once again be the leadoff station to start the event. We will be operating on Echolink from the NWS office. Then at 8 pm on the 145.49 repeater and linked system, we will hold a special check in net. Individual stations are encouraged to check in and regional partners who have their own nets are encouraged to have check I nets and turn in their numbers. Please, if doing so, make certain your spotters know the NWS appreciates their service and this day is for them! At 8:30 pm, we will move to the SMLRS system for a special check in net there. We would appreciate if you would pick one and not check into both as we are turning in our numbers for this event. (Duplicate check ins do not count!)
During the entire event, we will have HF stations operating under the NWS call sign N0NWS!