National Weather Service gets a MARS station

From the ARRL...



For unstinting public service by Amateur Radio there's no better example than the SKYWARN partnership between hams and the National Weather Service. But even that wasn't enough during the 1998 ice storm that knocked out telephone communications across large areas of the Northeastern US for up to several weeks.


During that emergency the NWS forecast office in Taunton, Massachusetts, outside Boston, lost contact with the NWS office in Gray, Maine, near Portland. Although dozens of SKYWARN members were activated throughout the long outage, their normal mode is VHF, and Gray is way out of VHF range of Taunton. Thus Taunton was unable to access Gray's vital weather data from northern New England.



The Army Military Affiliate Radio System (MARS) and NWS have taken a first step in avoiding such problems in future. Army MARS has licensed a club station at the NWS forecast office at Albany, New York, AAT2CAA. This facility will make it possible for hams with MARS licenses to operate directly from the forecast office when links are needed beyond VHF range. As 1998 proved, it happens.



All three MARS services--Army, Air Force, and Navy-Marine Corps--participate in the National Communications System's Shared Resources system linking federal agencies. Even if another NWS office lacks a MARS presence, Albany's traffic can now be relayed either by voice or digital mode through some other federal agency when needed.--Bill Sexton, N1IN