RIGHT-click here - Monitoring Times

every week and they had teams back in Miami
supporting them. When the first team arrived
they realized that the head doctor was trying
to communicate to the Comfort using a Blackberry.
It wasn’t working.
“One of my volunteers at the Hurricane
Center is also a pilot for a group called Brothers
to the Rescue, who fly the Florida Straits looking
for Cuban rafters, so he was very familiar
with talking to the Coast Guard,” Ripoll relates,
“He went to Haiti, taking along a VHF rig
capable of marine band frequencies and on the
first call to the Comfort they came back. That
became the primary link for five weeks between
the Comfort, the University of Miami Hospital
and all the neighboring medical centers that
popped up from other countries.”
Love Leads to Ham Ticket
While Ripoll’s life as a long-time amateur
radio emergency operator seems like a well
planned mission, it was a series of happy coincidences
that brought him to his first amateur
radio license. When he was in high school, the
father of a young woman he was dating, who
would later become his wife, had a Hallicrafters
SX-100 receiver in their living room with
a long-wire antenna on the ridge of the roof.
“That radio kind of caught my eye,” Ripoll
remembers, “her dad would tune around and
listen to the Voice of America, BBC World
Service, different broadcast stations and he
showed me what the BFO knob did when applied
to the ham radio frequencies.
“I remember tuning around on 20 meters
and I heard this noise that sounded like Donald
Duck and, when I played with the BFO, I
heard hams talking to each other. And, this is
1974, so there was great propagation and I was
hearing people from all over the states and the
Caribbean and it was incredible. That got me
interested.”
Ripoll was soon attending
a ham radio class at one of
the high schools in Miami that
was taught by one of the FAA
radio operators who was a CW
expert. Six years later Ripoll
found himself at the controls of
the first amateur radio station at
the National Hurricane Center.
At the time the station used
his original call sign WD4JNS/P
(for “portable” operation). Later
the NHC station received its
own call W4EHW in 1981
under the FCC random call assignment.
That call was issued
to the Dade County Amateur
Radio Public Service Corporation
(ARPSC), which was
a branch of ARES (Amateur
Radio Emergency Services).
The current call sign was
issued in 1993 after the vanity
call sign program was instituted
and the WX prefix became
available. A surge of weather
stations around the country
snapped up the call signs and
WX4NHC (Weather For National
Hurricane Center) was a
perfect fit.
Ripoll understands the urge
all hams have, as they monitor
the Hurricane Watch Net,
to help. “The most important
thing hams can do when the
Hurricane Watch Net is active,” Ripoll says,
“is to listen and relay. If you’re not inside the
affected area, just be on frequency and listen,
because during certain times of the day, people
in other parts of the country can hear a signal
that we can’t in Miami. That’s why it’s so
important.
The last radar image taken from the National Hurricane Center before the radar was blown off the
roof by Hurricane Andrew at 0835Z on August 24, 1992 (Courtesy: National Hurricane Center)
WX4NHC Flow Chart: How storm-related information is collected
and dispersed. (Courtesy: WX4NHC)
“It happened when Hurricane Fabian hit
Bermuda; we had zero propagation to Bermuda
but we had a ham in Canada who could
hear the ham in Bermuda clear as a bell. He
would relay down to another ham in Texas
who would relay back to us. So, we had two
relays between us and Bermuda and we were
able to get all the reports we needed. That’s the
main thing; you can’t have too many listening
stations, because propagation can change
rapidly, especially in the last few years when
conditions have been so poor.”
He has this final advice to hams monitoring
the frequency: “Expand your capabilities;
don’t just sit on one frequency. We always ask
people ‘Please go down to 40 and 80 meters,
there’s a Caribbean net down there that we
don’t hear that could have important information.
Bring that information up to 20 meters.
We can’t be on all frequencies all the time.
We sit on the Hurricane Watch Net frequency
14.325 and it’s fantastic when other people go
to other frequencies and bring back information.
It also works in reverse to spread the word
about hurricane advisories.”
According to the National Hurricane
Center, 2012 is expected to be a “typical”
hurricane season. But, NHC forecasters know
to expect the unexpected. And, when the next
Allen or Katrina starts forming somewhere
off Cape Verde or deep in the Gulf of Mexico,
watch developments at the National Hurricane
Center’s hurricane watch page, and wherever
and whenever landfall threatens, listen for
WX4NHC on 14.325 MHz on 20 meters.
August 2012 MONITORING TIMES 11