Tonight's EC net announcements are as follows:

1. Thanks to John - KB3MJD - and a great team, we are ready for the upcoming Technician License Class and Test Session. Coming this Saturday - June 26th from 8:00am until 4:00pm, the students will be taught all of the information necessary to pass the technician class license test. The test will then be administered starting at 4:00pm. This will all take place in room 171 of the Government Services Center. It is still not late to get your family, friends and neighbors to come to this class. This is a great way to share our great hobby with others.

2. Well, after much blood, sweat, tears, and a very strong storm, we successfully made it through this year's Peach Bottom Nuclear Generating Station Exercise. Through the valiant efforts of Bill Taylor - N3TR and Martin Odom - KB3PCY, CCAR provided a backup communications service to the County, and in particular, to West Nottingham Township. The evening was not without its surprises, including a very fast moving storm that produce a tornado in the Quarryville area.

3. Speaking of the Peach Bottom Drill...we were attempting to use the RMS node at our Bucktown site as our data path. The day before the exercise, Al - W3AHR, and myself spent some time at Bucktown trying to track down what we thought was an intermittent internet connection. Well, as we found out during the exercise, we didn't get it really fixed. At this point, we are pretty certain we have a defective thin client computer. Karl Mehn has graciously already ordered two new thin clients for us, so we can get the site up and running again quickly.

4. And lastly...this afternoon saw the completion of the County-Wide Strategic National Stockpile exercise. We had the very capable assistance of 10 CCAR members placed in hospitals, a school, the EOC, and the Local Logistics node. In short, ARES/RACES once again came out of the exercise with glowing praise from all our CCDES coworkers and managers. We debuted NBEMS as a new data handling mode and it worked flawlessly. We passed many messages using that mode and the results were perfect. All the data operators, and one or two voice operators filling in on data, performed like they knew what they were doing. I would like to encourage all CCAR members to try and get proficient with NBEMS. It really is very simple to learn and use. It is definitely a great mode to have in our go kits! A very big Thank You! to all those that gave up of their time over the last two days to participate in making this exercise a success!