More stuff

I haven't posted in a while so I'll give an update on what I've been up to. First of all, over the past few weeks I've been continuing to help with construction of the Mobile Communications Unit. I haven't been down there for a week and they've continued to make progress so check out the most recent pictures on John Scoggin's website, www.armymars.net

Also, I participated in a State Communications Seminar at DEMA to talk about the path forward in planning for a communications exercise. We had a lot of great presenters including Delaware State Police Comm, Division of Communications, Delaware National Guard Comm, Department of Technology and Information (DTI), and our program, Communication Corps. Each presenter gave a brief history of their communications system, it's current status, and their path forward. It gave each of us a great opportunity to ask questions about system integration, and also how we can request their resources. My presentation is below:



Along those same lines, it was important for DTI to be at this meeting, specifically because of the increasing role that internet based systems have on emergency communications. Ironically the night of the meeting, I needed to finish a term paper for Issues in Emergency Management 324, which was entitled "Benefits and Risks of Information Technology Use During Disaster Response". In the paper I talked specifically about the convergence of internet and radios and where it's going to take us. You can read the entire paper here:

http://www.kb3juv.com/BenefitsandRisks.pdf

Also, I wanted to mention briefly about a cell outage we had with Verizon Wireless this past Friday night. A little after 12am, my cell phone just stopped working. No service whatsoever. Now, you'd think with the way the media portrays cell phone companies with all of the dropped calls and everything that I would not be surprised. I was though, and I was pissed. I was out trying to find one of my friends and without any sort of communication device, I had no way to get in contact with them. I tried both voice, and text messaging. Neither worked.

It gave me a quick reminder of what it's like to not have communications during a time of need. Imagine that on a much larger scale during disaster...

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