HRN 536: The Ad Hoc Helene Nets

Last week, HRN hosts David W0DHG and Gary K4AAQ talked about some ad-hoc ham radio nets that spun up just after Tropical Storm Helene devastated a large area of North Carolina’s mountains, knocking out power, internet, phone and cell communications, flooding towns and destroying roads. The nets appeared to have no connection to any formal ham radio emcom organization. Initially they were passing lots of incoming Health & Welfare inquiries from hams or friends of hams on 40 meters (7232 kHz) and an ultra-wide coverage repeater on Mt. Mitchel (145.19 MHz). We speculated that messages like that probably couldn’t be delivered.We even streamed a few hours of the 40 meter net on our YouTube channel.

On this show we get the background. Dan Gitro K2DMG became the Net Control station on the Mt. Mitchel repeater for days on end, and he joins us to talk about how it got started and what it became as the days went by.