nwoods said:
Awesome report. I am a new ham, and have much to learn still. Please help me understand how you accomplished this rescue call. How did you find the Monument peak repeater? Once you found it, how did you know what the offset was?
Do you carry a book of repeaters around? If so, where did you get the book, and what is it called? Is it for San Diego area only, or national, or...?
I'd love to have a better fundamental use of my gear, but this information is hard to come by.
In my mobile radio, I have all of the repeaters (2M and 440), along with simplex freq's programmed, with a cheat sheet (spreadsheet printout) of the frequencies, offset direction, PL tone, and physical location, numbered by memory location in the radio. I didn't have this with me (in my mothers car) but I know where alot of the repeaters are now, and their freq's. The HT only has 100 memories and is 2M only, so it has a smaller list of freq's. I just keyed up repeaters until I found one I could access, starting with the closest and most active. Palomar was closer, but apparently shadowed at my location (I don't know where the repeater sites are on the mountian). The Monument Peak site, I thought, would be more shadowed but after looking at Tope USA with the profile feature, it was near line-of-site, since I was at 3500' and the repeater site is about 6500', with very little obstruction.
In an emergency it takes too long to program freq's. You need to have them in the radio already, all of them. You never know where you will be or what you will need when the stuff hits the fan. In a disaster, some may work and some may not. In SD County, I found this to be true in the wildfires.
I created the cheat sheet, because early on, I used to set my mobile radio on scan and scan through all the repeaters to hear the chatter. It give a good idea of which repeaters are most active and what the coverage is. When it stopped on a freq., I would look on the cheat sheet and know where it was. Also, this cheat sheet is very useful for programming other radios, since it has all the info needed to program the repeater into the radio. My cheat sheet now contains some of the more widely used repeaters in Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside as well, since I can often hear them in the mountians of SD and I do travel to those areas.
As to the call for help, I first came on with "Break for emergency traffic." Since the repeater wasn't in use and no one came back to me, I next called: "Can any station listening make an emergency 911 call for me?" The answering station came on and I gave him the location amd details. He made the call, and came back on the repeater a few minutes later saying that they were responding and that there were 2 sheriff and a CHP unit responding. I carried the HT with me from then on in case there was any more info needed. Sometimes the 911 operators need to call back for more info.
Now for the local info: Go to AC6V.com and look through the links posted there. There is a huge amount of ham radio info there, including emergency communication info, links to repeater lists for So Cal and other places, etc. Look for the Jet Propulsion Lab repeater list which gives repeaters for all of So Cal, color coded by county. There are also repeater maps of SD County, giving the programming info on the map. That is what I started with. The website is world famous and was started by AC6V Rod, a member of the Palomar club, who recently became a silent key (passed away). It is a huge resource. Rod's son has committed to keeping it running. SD Ham Radio Outlet has a couple of intro books to repeaters and DX contacts written by Rod. They are written for the beginner. I think you can buy them through the website as well.
Hope this helps. PM or email me if you have any other questions about anything.
