Gosh, hurricane season this year is turning out to be a kind of gift that keeps of giving, in a negative way. After discussing Tropical Cyclones in the South China Sea and Hurricanes in the Caribbean and on the west coast of Mexico, we now see evidence of a devastating Category Four Hurricane, called HELENE, having struck Florida, Georgia and South Carolina since Friday.

Coming straight up from the southern Caribbean, it has also caused a lot of rain and wind in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, over Belize and most of Cuba. Florida’s flooding by this category four hurricane has wind speeds greater than 200km/h and has caused mandatory evacuations to be announced in multiple counties, where very heavy rainfall was forecast for this weekend. Thirty fatalities had been reported by Friday night, and more can be expected. Five and a half million people have been in its direct path and 2.2 million customers don’t have power across Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.

The Hurricane Watch Net was activated at 10h00 Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday and its operations were closed on Friday at 11h00. During this time, members of the hurricane watch net collected and forwarded over 100 surface reports to the National Hurricane Centre. Frequencies used were 7.268MHz and 14.325MHz.

The west coast of Mexico has also been experiencing its own hurricane, called JOHN, which, as a Category Three Hurricane, is threatening about 150000 people with winds of up to 194km/h. It crossed the Pacific coastline of Mexico on Friday evening and has caused catastrophic flash flooding and mudslides in portions of Southern and Southwestern Mexico. , By the time it has dissipated, up to 20 inches (500mm) of rain may have fallen in some states of Mexico.

When Hurricane John initially made landfall it left 100,000 residents and businesses without power, uprooted trees and power poles while ripping off roofs. Hurricane-force winds extended outward up to 16km from the storm’s centre and tropical-storm-force winds extended outward up to 200km. By Friday night, 5 fatalities had been reported in Guerrero state.

Weather forecasters are predicting more very cold weather in KZN this coming week.  iol.co.za says that KwaZulu-Natal’s disaster management teams have been placed on standby amid reports of possible snow over parts of the province next week.

Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs MEC, Reverend Thulasizwe Buthelezi, said early forecasts indicate the province will experience extremely cold temperatures today and on Monday and Tuesday of this week. This will potentially result in snowfall in some areas around the Drakensberg Mountains, and include parts of the Harry Gwala, uThukela, uMgungundlovu, and Amajuba Districts.

He said that while this forecast is preliminary, further updates are expected in due course. He urged residents to monitor weather forecasts through reliable sources. I hope the N3 isn’t closed off again, like two weekends ago.

A quick paragraph from a report issued by Yoshiki Enomoto, ICOM executive and board member, after the Hizbollah explosions, confirms that their V82 radios and batteries were last shipped in October 2014. He said there are at least as many counterfeit versions circulating today as were sold before that. He said further that, in all pictures released of damaged radios, they seemed to be missing a holographic seal which guarantees ICOM’s authentic product. He and his company were therefore 99.9% sure that their products were not involved in the middle-east explosions of the previous week.  I’m sure you’ll agree this is good news.

Continuing in this handheld vein, I’m sure you’ll also agree that you are not much good as an emergency communicator without a handheld radio, or Handie-Talkie, as they are usually described. In his blog of 22^nd September, Bob K0NR says that Motorola trademarked the name Handie-Talkie and used that nomenclature for many years with its line of portable radios. However, this trademark has expired, so now Handie-Talkie is a generic term.

Bob goes on: “But the HT-220 was not the first Handie-Talkie, so I started poking around to find out how this name originated. Back in World War II, the SCR-536 was a portable “hand-held” transceiver developed in 1940 by Galvin Manufacturing (later Motorola, Inc.)  I put “hand-held” in quotes because, by today’s standards, it was a Hand FULL. But most people consider the SCR-536 to be the first modern, self-contained HT transceiver. The Wikipedia article for the SCR-536 describes the radio quite well. The radio put out about 360 mW of RF power on 3.5 and 6.0 MHz (Oops, I mean 3500 to 6000 kilocycles) using Amplitude Modulation (AM). The circuitry relied on smallish vacuum tubes, creating quite a design challenge. Motorola has a page on its website that talks about the origins of the radio. IEEE Spectrum also published an excellent article: The SCR-536 Handie-Talkie Was the Modern Walkie-Talkie’s Finicky Ancestor. The January 2005 issue of QST has an interesting article by Gil McElroy, VE3PKD, ‘A Short History of the Handheld Transceiver’. It provides more history and insight into this fun topic.

“A few years later (1942), a backpack portable radio was introduced, called the SCR-300. I always assumed that the backpack-style radio would have come first and the more compact radio SCR-536 would be later. (Actually, there were previous backpack radios, such as the SCR-194). This new backpack-style radio was referred to as a Walkie-Talkie. According to the manual, the SCR-300 was “primarily intended as a walkie-talkie for foot combat troops”. I suppose the emphasis was on how you can walk and talk, with a radio on your back.

“The radio weighed a heavy 35 pounds, and used Frequency Modulation (FM) on 40 to 48 Megacycles. The SCR-194 that predated the SCR-300 might be considered the first walkie-talkie. However, the SCR-300 and the SCR-536 seem to get all of the glory, probably due to their impact on the war effort.

“Fast forward to today and we see that the HT and Handie-Talkie nomenclature is common in the amateur radio world. The term “walkie-talkie” has morphed to something quite different and is used generically to describe a handheld radio. This term covers a wide range of radios, from low-cost Family Radio Service (FRS) radios to higher-quality professional radios. This is quite different from the original Walkie-Talkie, a backpack radio weighing 35 pounds.”

I hope Bob K0NR will forgive me for borrowing parts of his blog, and leaving out some military aspects, which are not relevant to this report. Thank you, Bob!

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR, with at least three Handie-Talkies in his shack, only two hands to operate them with, and reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

Central Europe has been consumed with news of heavy rainfall and flash flooding this week, from a storm named BORIS, particularly affecting Romania, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Deaths and displacements have been notified since last weekend.

Greg Mossop G0DUB has kept up a running daily news blog of reports coming in from IARU Region One Emcomm representatives from these countries. It would appear that Poland was severely affected, and Michal Brennek SP2J, has reported that the Prime Minister issued a state of natural disaster in southern parts of the country, allowing quicker response times and mobilized funds.

As part of the response, Krzysztof SP5E, President of the Polish National Society PZK reports that Polish Radio Amateurs responding to the flooding are likely to use VHF/UHF for the primary response but they are also noting that 3.760MHz, 7.110MHz, and 14.300MHz may also be used. All radio amateurs are asked to keep these Emergency Centre of Activity frequencies clear if needed for message handling. 

The effects of the flooding are also being felt along the river Danube with Slovakia and Hungary already seeing rising river levels. 

The rivers Danube, Elbe, Vistula and Oder all have catchment regions, and river flooding may be seen more widely across parts of Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania over the coming days, so amateurs are asked please to listen before transmitting in the area on any of the Emergency Centre of Activity frequencies listed above and avoid causing interference to any response activities. 

Thanks to the IARU for those last few paragraphs of their communique.

As of Wednesday (the last day or reporting), GDACS set the death toll at 22 souls over central Europe, with many thousands of homes destroyed, and an even greater number of people displaced. Water levels in rivers in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary were continuing to rise.

Thankfully, drier conditions did start to set in on Thursday the 19^th.

Meanwhile the South China Sea, Philippines, Taiwan and the southernmost tip of Japan have faced their third Tropical Cyclone in about 2 weeks. I mentioned storm YAGI 14 days ago, and storm BEBINCA last Sunday. In the course of this week, storm PULUSAN started moving northwest towards eastern China and on 18 September at 00h00 UTC, its centre was located approximately 500 km south-east of Ryukyu islands, southern Japan with maximum sustained winds of 102 km/h. PULASAN was forecast to cross the central Ryukyu islands on 19 September and to make landfall as a tropical storm.

And to add insult to injury, Tropical depression GENER crossed the northern Philippines on 16-17 September, and according to the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) possibly would strengthen into a tropical storm as it passed south of the coasts of Hainan, south-eastern China and eastern Vietnam on 19 September. Moderate to locally very heavy rainfall was expected over northern Philippines, Hainan Island and most of Vietnam. 

The Natal Witness, on its website, said on Thursday that Disaster management teams have been placed on high alert across KZN in anticipation of inclement weather conditions expected this weekend.

According to a weather advisory issued by the South African Weather Service (SAWS), a spring cut-off low will bring snow and very cold, wet, and windy conditions to the province this weekend.

These inclement weather conditions pose a potential risk to human life and livestock.

The MEC for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Thulasizwe Buthelezi, has warned residents about the weather conditions, which could result in localised flooding of roads, walkways and low-lying bridges.

The weather conditions have caused road closures due to snow, particularly in areas around the Drakensberg. So the N3 between Estcourt and Harrismith was totally shut down yesterday morning by heavy snow. I doubt whether the road will be cleared for a couple of days.

Buthelezi said disaster management teams have been assigned to monitor areas prone to weather-related incidents.

Residents who rely on generators and braziers are urged to use caution when using these methods to keep warm.

This is of particular concern, because this weekend marks the start of the September vacation for all schools in the country, and therefore the N3 has the potential to be very busy over the weekend, as Gauteng holiday-makers stream perhaps to KZN’s coastline for some warmer weather and the start of spring. Travellers are indeed urged to exhibit caution, and not be in a hurry in their travels. As things stand, KZN is not accessible by the usual routes from Gauteng. Remember, a slow trip and safe arrival is far better than a rapid journey without an arrival at all.

The series of detonations of electronic pagers and 2-way radios in the middle-east this week gives amateur radio operators cause for concern. Pagers have mostly been phased out in community life, because they are a means of delivering one-way traffic only to the carrier of the pager, with no possibility of a reply. Their means of transmission is regarded as safer and not possible to be hacked, and was therefore preferred by their users in the middle-east.

However, our hobby and our use of two-way radio communication is affected by the media showing a variety of exploded two-way radios, apparently made by ICOM, one of the big three Japanese amateur radio manufacturers. The damaged radios shown in the pictures have usually been ICOM V82 2metre handhelds.

ICOM last made and shipped V82’s and their associated batteries in 2014, so anything that looks fairly new in the pictures is clearly some sort of clone. The problem is that ICOM’s reputation as a solid and dependable transceiver manufacturer is going to be tarnished by the sight of these damaged radios. Anybody with a trace of conspiracy obsession in him is going to condemn ICOM, and be scared off investing in any other ICOM product, on the grounds that the planting of explosives in these radios was done at an ICOM source, and what other ICOM products might also explode during use?

Happily, ICOM has been quick to distance itself from any involvement in this disastrous story, and hopefully the worldwide radio community, not just radio amateurs, will believe them as they plead no involvement in the plot.

In similar vein, the Taiwanese company whose pagers exploded is claiming no involvement, saying the trade mark for the pagers was licensed to a company in Hungary. However, damage has been done to both these companies, which is unfortunate. Of course, the political implications of all this is outside the scope of our report.

Finally, may I remind you that this weekend marks the Spring Equinox in the southern hemisphere, so the days are now longer than the nights, thank goodness, and we can hopefully start packing the heaters, extra duvets, and thick clothing away. It can’t happen too quickly, as far as I am concerned.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR, using all my ICOM radios without concern, and reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

Hot on the heels of last week’s Tropical Cyclone YAGI, comes BEBINCA, with a fairly similar trajectory, only slightly more east of YAGI’s trail, and therefore missing the Philippines, but still aimed squarely at the coast of China.

It was first reported on Monday, having arisen in the North West Pacific, close to the island of Guam, and aiming north-west towards China as mentioned. On its way, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the southernmost tip of Japan were to experience maximum wind speeds of 185km/h. About 1.2 million people were threatened in its path.

By Tuesday, China was included in the warning, and nearly 16 million people were threatened with winds of up to 120km/h. On Wednesday a RED alert was issued by GDACS, and average wind speeds for the entire path were estimated at 194km/h. The number of people at risk had risen to 25 million or more.

Fortunately, the storm abated a bit by Thursday, probably crossing the central Ryukyu islands of Japan today (Sunday), and headed for the eastern coast of Zhejiang Province in eastern China tomorrow (Monday). By Saturday, wind speeds had dropped to about 100km/h, and it was classified as a tropical storm. That is a huge relief for those countries, faced with the possibility of two major typhoons in 2 weeks!

The final statistics of storm YAGI, by the way, showed 152 deaths, 80 people missing, 872 injured souls, and 124000 people evacuated to safety, in Philippines, Vietnam and China.

In the Caribbean, Tropical Cyclone FRANCINE developed quite quickly midweek, and by Thursday had made landfall in Louisiana, south west of New Orleans as a category two storm. Luckily it quickly weakened to a category one storm, with wind speeds in the 80km/h range. It was moving northeast toward Mississippi at 20km/h.

A turn to the north northeast was expected on Friday, with some reduction in forward speed. The ARRL letter for Thursday the 12^th notes that Ham radio operators volunteering with the ARRL® Amateur Radio Emergency Service® (ARES®) have successfully completed operations for Hurricane FRANCINE, now regarded as a tropical storm. “We had a huge positive showing of ARES team members checking in and doing the ‘thing.’ I sincerely appreciate everyone leaning into this activation,” said Robert Hayes, KC5IMN, Section Emergency Coordinator of the ARRL Mississippi Section.

At least 419,942 people were without power early Thursday morning. PowerOutage.us reported 392,440 people without power in Louisiana and 27,502 in Mississippi.

The Hurricane Watch Net secured operations but remains at HWN Alert Level 2 monitoring mode. During their 14-hour activation, Net Manager Bobby Graves said they collected and forwarded surface reports from south eastern Louisiana and the Mississippi Gulf Coast to the National Hurricane Centre by way of WX4NHC. A total of 58 reports were submitted to WX4NHC, the amateur radio station at the National Hurricane Centre, some of which were used in NHC Advisories and Tropical Cyclone Updates. Reports ranged from wind damage to buildings, tree and wire damage reports, coastal storm surge flooding, wind measurement, rain gauge and rain-related street flooding reports.

Thanks to the ARRL for those excerpts from their letter.

An enterprising fellow with call sign AA7FO has gone to the trouble of converting the entire book written by HG Wells called “War of the Worlds” into Morse code in 214 mp3 files. This is as practice for people wishing to increase their copy speed. The first 29 files are set at 20 words per minute, the next 30 at 22 WPM, and the final 154 files at 24 WPM. So this is for the serious code enthusiast, but still an interesting way of challenging one with fast Morse and interesting subject matter.

For those that don’t remember, Wikipaedia says that The War of the Worlds is a science fiction novel by English author H. G. Wells. It was written between 1895 and 1897, and serialised in Pearson’s Magazine in the UK and Cosmopolitan magazine in the US in 1897. The full novel was first published in hardcover in 1898 by William Heinemann. The War of the Worlds is one of the earliest stories to detail a conflict between humankind and an extra-terrestrial race. The novel is the first-person narrative of an unnamed protagonist in Surrey and his younger brother who escapes to Tillingham in Essex as London and southern England is invaded by Martians. It is one of the most commented-on works in the science fiction canon.

It is best remembered for the magnificent and dramatic way in which Orson Wells, who was no relation to the author, produced a CBS radio show in October 1938, which was interrupted by a series of “Breaking News” flashes, announcing that the world had been invaded by Martians. A large number of listeners were taken in by the broadcast, having missed the original announcement that the entire show was a work of fiction.

Poor old Orson Wells had his work cut out apologizing at a hastily called news conference the next morning, as the public outrage continued, but he gained the reputation of an innovative storyteller and trickster.

Anyway, you can go to www.aa7fo.com/war-of-the-worlds.html/ for the practice files.

While we are in space, I thought you ought to know that the average age of a GPS satellite is now 13 years, with half of them exceeding their designed lifespan.

Payloadspace.com says that the USA-132 satellite broke the record for the oldest GPS satellite in history, having completed 27+ years in operation. While the record is an indicator of the reliability and robust engineering of the GPS satellite, it also means that the service still relies on hardware built in the 1990s. 

The Global Positioning System has long been one of the most important and widely-used services in the world but the US navigational network is showing signs of aging, slipping into a pattern of maintaining the status quo rather than driving innovation. 

The history of GPS goes all the way back to the world’s first satellite, Sputnik. George Weiffenbach and William Guier of the John Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory found that they could track the satellite’s location by analysing its radio signal.

This discovery paved the way for the US’s first, but limited, satellite-based geo-positioning system, dubbed “Transit,” in the 1960s.

Ever-increasing Cold War tensions drove the military’s need to improve the timing and positioning services, leading to the development of a new and improved version, the Navigation System with Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR). 

NAVSTAR is the GPS system we know today. There are currently 31 GPS satellites in orbit, and the threshold for adequate cover is regarded as 24.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR, who has no idea where he is if he doesn’t use GPS satellites, and reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

Since Monday the 2^nd, GDACS has been carrying warnings about a new Tropical Cyclone in the North West Pacific, with a name that will resonate well with radio amateurs.

Tropical Storm YAGI arose on the 1^st, over the northern islands of Philippines, and then started moving towards China. Later on the 2^nd, a RED alert level for Philippines and China was issued, with expected high wind speeds of 210km/h.

By Wednesday the Vietnamese border with China was included in the warning as well as Laos, and estimated maximum wind speeds of 241km/h were forecast.  Nearly 14 million people were in the path of 120km/h winds.

On Saturday the GDACS newsletter said that, following YAGI’s passage over northern and eastern Philippines in combination with the south-west monsoon, 16 people had died, 13 others had been injured and 17 were still missing. Moreover, almost 550,000 people had been affected and almost 48,000 displaced across eight regions of the country.

YAGI was expected to continue westward over the South China Sea on 4-6 September, further strengthening, and to make landfall between northern Hainan Island and south-eastern Guangdong province, south-eastern China on 6 September, with maximum sustained winds up to 240 km/h. It was expected yesterday to cross the coast of Northern Vietnam in the Hanoi region as well, with maximum sustained wind speeds of 185km/h.

In the same report Brian Jacobs ZS6YZ sent to me last week, he reported on an agreement that has been signed with the Brakpan Aero Club which manages the Brakpan Airport (FABB) on behalf of the City of Ekurhuleni. The agreement allows HAMNET Gauteng full access to the Airport facilities. This allows the HAMNET container with their cache of equipment to be moved to Brakpan Airfield. A space has been allocated for the container and Ekurhuleni Disaster Management has also requested that their logo be added to the HAMNET container.

HAMNET also has permission to use the extensive area on the airport for training. The first training event on 14 September will be a fox hunt with a twist, amongst the hangers, so that the members who have not yet been involved in a PLB or ELT recovery can get some practice in an environment where reflections of the signal can cause confusion while hunting for the device.

Very good news, that, Brian, and I’m glad the HAMNET container has been centralized to a place where it will always be accessible.

The City of Cape Town’s Disaster Risk Management Centre (DRMC) says that volunteers play a critical role in disaster mitigation efforts.

DRMC has relied heavily on its crop of volunteers in the past year to amplify its response to fires, floods and other public safety risks in Cape Town. The metro has experienced a surge in severe weather conditions in the past two years, including damaging winds and record high rainfall, that has resulted in flooding and property damage, and accelerated the extent of both wildfires and structural fires.

This has resulted in an increased demand on the services of the Disaster Risk Management Centre, and its dedicated crop of volunteers, to help those in need.

DRMC has 419 registered volunteers, working in teams in various parts of the metropole. They are activated through the Disaster Operations Centre via their unit coordinators to assist officials in affected communities for the duration of an incident or event.

During the period April to June this year, volunteers spent 18 471 hours assisting DRMC officials – this equates to more than 769 days of voluntary service.

The appointment of volunteers is entrenched in the Disaster Management Volunteer Regulations Framework, which allows the City to establish volunteer units and by doing so, empower communities effectively to respond to disaster relief efforts.

Thanks to iol.co.za for this report.

HAMNET Western Cape has signed a memorandum of understanding with the DRMC, and has a dedicated radio station (ZS1DCC) at the Goodwood Headquarters, with UHF, VHF, APRS, HF, Winlink, VarAC, and Echolink, as well as Marine monitoring capability, and a 5 GHz microwave link directly with a similar station (ZS1DZ) at the Provincial Emergency Management Centre at Tygerberg Hospital, which manages provincial disasters and their communications. The 5 GHz link is independent of all other means of communications between ZS1DCC and ZS1DZ, and completely private.

Here’s something with applications in amateur radio. Phys.org reports that researchers at ETH Zurich have managed to make sound waves travel only in one direction. In the future, this method could also be used in technical applications with electromagnetic waves.

Water, light and sound waves usually propagate in the same way forward as in a backward direction. As a consequence, when we are speaking to someone standing some distance away from us, that person can hear us as well as we can hear them. Ten years ago, researchers succeeded in suppressing sound wave propagation in the backward direction; however, this also attenuated the waves traveling forwards.

A team of researchers at ETH Zurich led by Nicolas Noiray, professor for Combustion, Acoustics and Flow Physics, in collaboration with Romain Fleury at EPFL, has now developed a method for preventing sound waves from traveling backward without deteriorating their propagation in the forward direction.

In the future, this method, which has recently been published in Nature Communications, could also be applied to electromagnetic waves.

Among other things, Noiray studies how self-sustaining thermo-acoustic oscillations can arise from the interplay between sound waves and flames in the combustion chamber of an aircraft engine, which can lead to dangerous vibrations. In the worst case, these vibrations can destroy the engine.

Noiray had the idea to use harmless self-sustaining aero-acoustic oscillations in order to allow sound waves to pass only in one direction and without any losses through a so-called circulator. In his scheme, the unavoidable attenuation of the sound waves is compensated by the self-oscillations in the circulator synchronizing with the incoming waves, which allows them to gain energy from those oscillations.

The circulator itself was supposed to consist of a disk-shaped cavity through which swirling air is blown from one side through an opening in its centre. For a specific combination of blowing speed and intensity of the swirl, a whistling sound is thus created in the cavity.

“In contrast to ordinary whistles, in which sound is created by a standing wave in the cavity, in this new whistle it results from a spinning wave,” explains Tiemo Pedergnana, a former doctoral student in Noiray’s group and lead author of the study.

From the idea to the experiment, it took a while. First, Noiray and his co-workers investigated the fluid mechanics of the spinning wave whistle, and then added three acoustic waveguides to it, which are arranged in a triangular shape along the edge of the circulator.

Sound waves that are fed in through the first waveguide can leave the circulator through the second waveguide. However, a wave entering through the second waveguide cannot exit “backwards” through the first waveguide, but can do so through the third waveguide.

“This concept of loss-compensated non-reciprocal wave propagation is, in our view, an important result that can also be transferred to other systems,” says Noiray. He sees his sound wave circulator mainly as a powerful toy model for the general approach of wave manipulation using synchronized self-oscillations that can, for instance, be applied to metamaterials for electromagnetic waves.

In this way, microwaves in radar systems could be guided better, and so-called topological circuits could be realized, with which signals can be routed in future communications systems.

Hmm – wonder whether this technology could be used in a flaming argument with your Significant Other, in which neither of you can hear what the other is saying! It might defuse the situation very quickly.

To be honest, radio aficionados have been using circulators for a long time. I wonder why it took so long to apply the process to sound.

This is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.

Good grief! September already! Time really does fly while you’re having fun playing radio..

Bad news from theguardian.com says that Japan’s strongest typhoon of the year has made landfall in the country’s south-west, bringing torrential rain and winds of up to 252 km/h, strong enough to destroy homes.

The meteorological agency said Tropical Cyclone SHANSHAN, referred to in Japan as Typhoon No 10, made landfall on the island of Kyushu at around 8am on Thursday the 29^th August. The power company said 254,610 houses were already without electricity.

The meteorological agency predicted 1,100mm of precipitation in southern Kyushu in the 48 hours to Friday morning, around half the annual average for the area, which comprises Kagoshima and Miyazaki prefectures.

Authorities issued a rare special typhoon warning for most parts of Kagoshima, a prefecture in southern Kyushu. Residents in at-risk areas have been urged to remain on high alert, with transport operators and airlines cancelling trains and flights.

Japan has issued special typhoon warnings only three times in the past. The first came in July 2014, when a strong typhoon brought record-breaking waves to the southern prefecture of Okinawa before moving north, killing three people in landslides in Nagano prefecture.

In October 2016, authorities issued a similar warning for Okinawa’s main island. The typhoon moved north over the sea west of the southernmost main island of Kyushu.

The most recent special typhoon warning came in September 2022 – the first time the warning had been issued outside Okinawa prefecture, according to public broadcaster NHK. 

The potential for major damage is high given SHANSHAN’s sluggish speed. The storm is moving northwards at just 15km/h, the meteorological agency said.

There have already been reports of deaths in landslides – a major hazard in mountainous areas – while tens of thousands of people have been advised to evacuate.

“Typhoon SHANSHAN is expected to approach southern Kyushu with extremely strong force through Thursday,” chief cabinet secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters earlier. “It is expected that violent winds, high waves and storm surges at levels that many people have never experienced before, may occur.”

The agency also issued its highest “special warning” for violent storms, waves and high tides in parts of the Kagoshima region, with authorities there advising 56,000 people to evacuate.

The warnings indicate the “possibility that a major disaster prompted by [the typhoon] is extremely high,” Satoshi Sugimoto, chief forecaster of the meteorological agency, told a news conference.

Thanks to theguardian.com for these excerpts from their article.

I have reports from two South African sources for you this week.

Brian Jacobs, ZS6YZ, Deputy National Director of HAMNET tells me that HAMNET Gauteng were invited by Ekurhuleni Disaster Management to attend the Weather and Climate Information Services Early Warning Systems for Southern Africa (WISER-EWSA) Co-Production and Testbed preparatory Co-design Workshops that were held in Katlehong from 13-16 August 2024. Brian ZS6YZ, Leon ZS6LMG and Johan ZS6DMX attended the workshops and were also requested to do two presentations.

Leon presented on the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP). The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) is an XML-based data format for exchanging public warnings and emergencies between alerting technologies. CAP allows a warning message to be consistently disseminated simultaneously over many warning systems to many applications, such as Google Public Alerts and Cell Broadcast. CAP increases warning effectiveness and simplifies the task of activating a warning for responsible officials.

Brian did a presentation on Amateur Radio, and HAMNET, and also gave the local community some information about what to do if an aircraft happened to crash in or near the community so that they are aware that the scene is effectively a crime scene. As a result, everything needs to be preserved as evidence for the accident investigators from the South African Civil Aviation Authority (SACAA).

It was a very informative workshop and, while Brian and Leon have in the past been involved in SA Weather Service workshops, it again helped to strengthen relations with the Weather Service, and Ekurhuleni Disaster Management. Further, the opportunity to introduce Amateur Radio and HAMNET to the community also helps when HAMNET is requested to work in the community, while assisting Ekurhuleni Disaster Management with emergency communications.

Thank you Brian, for that update. More from him in next week’s bulletin.

Then Ian Bradley ZS1BR, has sent me a report on the All Tar Motor Rally, held at Killarney race track in Cape Town at the beginning of August. He says:

”Radio operators were greeted by an unusually chilly morning with some having to scrape frost off their vehicles before heading to the racetrack at Killarney! Control was established at the New Pits by 08:00 with a dual band magmount antenna stuck to the metal roof of the building giving us good comms across the track. Due to the proximity of all stages, we were able to run on VHF simplex for the duration of the rally. However, some QRM on our primary frequency forced us to move to our backup frequency partway through the day.

“As always, operators were placed at the start and end of each stage, as well as a couple of floating radios to fill in any gaps. Andre, ZS1ATX had the best seat in the house, being situated with the commentators in the tower.

“The first stage of the rally was underway by 09:10 with 41 competitors heading out at one-minute intervals. The field was split between regular rally cars and “challengers” which were a mix of track and road cars who would not normally be able to compete in regular rallies.

“If the sheer number of vehicles weren’t enough to keep operators’ hands full, a serious accident occurred during the second stage. Medics and recovery vehicles were quickly dispatched to the scene and the stage paused. A second incident occurred in the third stage, bringing it to a halt while the driver and navigator were carefully extracted and transported to hospital.

“All manner of breakdowns, from blown turbos to flat tyres, whittled down the field to 29 cars, with some skipping stages to undertake repairs. No further incidents hampered the day however, and the race was brought to an end just as the sun started to dip below the horizon.

“Special thanks to Roger ZR1AKK, Davy ZR1FR, Johan ZR1JL, Andre ZS1ATX, Jannie ZS1JFK, Johann ZS1JM, and of course to Ian himself, ZS1BR”

Ian encourages amateurs to volunteer their time and expertise, even if new to amateur radio or sports communication, to assist in making these events safer while also making some noise on the air! Thank you, Ian for your usual comprehensive report.

From a sunny and mild Western Cape, this is Dave Reece ZS1DFR reporting for HAMNET in South Africa.