Welcome to 2015

Happy New Year! It’s going to be a very busy year for VWR. Your help is needed to make the events we support go smoothly. Volunteer now!

On the topic of repeaters, DMR aka MotoTRBO had a very big year in 2014, with 3 times as many active repeaters on DMR-MARC as there were in 2013. We are working together to find the best solution that will serve the community.

If you are interested in DMR aka MotoTRBO, please contact me at aj.grantham at gmail dot com!

Brief website outage & Fit One 2014

Sorry for the downtime everyone! The domain name that this site’s DNS points to expired a couple days ago and I thought it was set up to automatically renew. Oddly enough it wasn’t. So when it expired, the private NS entries dropped out and hosed several other sites. We’re back up!

Major thanks to everyone that came out this morning to assist on Fit One 2014 put on by the folks at St Luke’s. No major issues and things ran pretty smoothly. This year the organizers were on DMR rental radios (Motorola MotoTRBO XPR6550s) so we were only able to communicate with them using the one spare radio they had. In years past they’ve been on analog narrowband UHF that we were able to communicate directly with. Major improvement over last year as logistics was on simplex and medical was on the only repeater. This year both medical and logistics were on the repeater (different timeslots).

Quick edit – handhelds used were XPR6550s, not the mobile XPR4550 🙂

Project Preparedness 2014


What is Project Preparedness 2014? Valleywide REACT is taking on the task of deploying Digital Mobile Radio, also known as DMR or MotoTRBO, repeaters throughout our impact area in Southwest Idaho and Eastern Oregon to provide for:
– Resilient emergency communications
– Efficient use of spectrum
– Dedicated public service radio use
– Improve the use of Amateur (Ham) Radio in community and government emergency preparedness plans

Project Preparedness 2014 is in the funding stage at this point with a bench launch planned for Winter 2014. The network will consist of 8 DMR repeaters covering from Twin Falls, Idaho to Vale, Oregon and extending to New Meadows south to Jordan Valley. This all digital two way radio network is open to anyone with an FCC issued Amateur Radio license, a DMR handheld or mobile radio and a desire to help their community.

DMR is a natural migration from traditional analog wideband communications and allows for greater spectrum use with limited infrastructure. DMR is vendor neutral – no one is locked in to only using one particular brand of radio like Icom’s DSTAR product and has a GPS location mapping element built in to the ETSI international standard.

If you are interested in more information about Valleywide REACT’s DMR plans or to get involved in DMR in your community, feel free to email AJ Grantham, K6LOR at his callsign at ARRL dot net.

Field Day 2014

We’re putting together a Field Day team for June 28-29 with set up starting after 5 pm on Friday June 27. This will be at a location in south Caldwell. Email me if you are interested or call me directly.

-AJ, K6LOR

Website back up!

Sorry for the downtime while I was in Utah visiting family, the web hosting company changed server IP addresses and the changes for DNS did not take place as they were suppose to. Back to smooth sailing!