Carroll County MD new club van

[Frank Gentges]

Carroll County Amateur Radio Club has obtained an old TV van similar to 
the AMRAD van.  A nice set of pictures are posted at
http://www.qis.net/%7Ek3pzn/van.htm

We might find some common interests with these fellows.

We discovered a cracked exhaust manifold on the Ford 351 engine and it 
will not pass safety inspection until we get it fixed.  I am going to 
try a repair.

We are getting a satellite terminal that will give us an Internet 
connection.  With that connection we can do a lot of things to support a 
disaster.  One thing we could do is to download commercial photo 
satellite pictures of the disaster site.  We can then process these and 
print out useful pictures for the people managing the response to the 
disaster. 

We need to get prearranged permission/access to these files and we need 
to get someone in AMRAD up to speed on what is available and how we 
would decide just what to download and use.  Much of the commercial 
stuff is mulitspectral so a wise choice of the proper spectral picture 
could help make the pictures we provide much more useful.  Better yet 
the combination of several spectral pictures into a composite picture.  
Anyway, do we have someone interested in working on developing some 
expertise.  Also we could use a nice wide carriage photo quality ink jet 
printer to make nice large printouts.

I have been charging the batteries and the terminal voltage is coming up 
but has not reached full charge yet.  Perhaps tomorrow full charge will 
be achieved.  Right now I don't want to let all the batteries get 
discharged and deteriorate.  We need a better charging system.

I have scrounged up a 65 amp Leece Naville alternator that actually 
provides 135 amps above idle on a police car.  Sandy is looking at how 
we can combine such an alternator with a small gas engine into a nice 
portable motor-generator set to go with the van.

Frank