The Section Manager is pleased to announce that we have some new leaders that have stepped up to assume different levels of responsibility in District 14.  Jimmy Flanary, K4GV, has agreed to assume the duties of Assistant Section Emergency Coordinator over District 14 (ASEC-14), Bill Perkins, KJ4ASH, has assumed duties as District Emergency Coordinator over District 14 (DEC-14), and Jim McKinnon, WK4W, has assumed the duties of Emergency Coordinator (EC) for Smyth County in District 14. 

Former ASEC-14 Bernie Leonard, W4LGY, has stepped down from the ASEC position to take care of family matters.  "Bernie is a great guy and I really enjoy working with him," stated SEC Joe Safranek, K4JJS, "and I told him he was not getting off that easy.  I reminded him I still have his phone number!"  Bernie has been a trusted colleague and friend and has done much to further the emergency communications (EMCOMM) mission in Southwest Virginia.  He will still be called upon to assist in various projects as his time will allow.

All three of the new appointees have previous ARES and a lot of EMCOMM experience.  ASEC-14 Jim Flanary will continue on as Scott County EC while performing his new duties.  DEC-14 Bill Perkins, will continue to serve as Grayson County EC in addition to his DEC duties.  Bill is a former EC of Henrico County in District 6.  Jim McKinnon, another long time ham, brings a wealth of experience to the EC position including a great interest in packet communications.

We stand up and salute these members for taking on these new duties and thank them for their support of EMCOMM in the Commonwealth.

Sadly, Dr. William Brushwood Brown, W4OUK, has become a silent key.  Doc Brown, a well-known and highly respected member of the Virginia amateur radio community, passed away Sunday, June 27, at his home in Naxera (Gloucester County, VA). Dr. Brown was a member of the Quarter Century Wireless Association (QCWA) Chapter 119. He was licenced in 1958 and has remained an active amateur radio 
operator ever since. 

Dr. Brown devoted many years of his life to the medical community. After earning his medical degree in 1956 and a residency in Danville, Dr. Brown served in the Navy as a Naval Flight Surgeon. In 1960, he and his brother Raymond entered into private practice in Gloucester. In 1972, he served overseas as a Regional Medical Officer with the US Foreign Service, returning to Gloucester upon his retirement in 1993.

Dr. Brown will be missed by his family and friends, by the medical community, and by his fellow 
hams.

Field Day is this weekend, and I'm sure many of you are planning to participate.  Please be sure to help out in setting up and tearing down of all that is needed for a successful Field Day, and be sure to thank those who provided the "field."  And don't forget to invite your local officials to help them understand the importance of amateur radio in emergency services.

We would love to hear your success stories: the technical challenges you had to overcome, the journalist who wanted to find out more about amateur radio, the young boy or girl who experienced ham radio for the first time and decided to get their ticket, or how a group of friends got together for a common purpose and had a great time.  

Whatever your experience, we would like to hear about it.  Please submit your stories to your local Public Information Officer or directly to Rick Ross, Virginia Section Public Information Coordinator, at kg4tax@cox.net.

Recently the webteam has been getting a lot of reports about problems with the captcha part of the ARES/RACES Registration form. After receiving each report, some members of the webteam would scramble to test the captcha form on the registration page and never encountered an error, until one member of the webteam, let's call him "T", realized that the team was testing the WRONG FORM!

There are two registration forms on the site, the website registration and the ARES/RACES Registration. Whether, or not it makes sense, the redundancy is there for a reason. Since the domain name is "aresracesofva.org", "T" was just relating registration to the site registration. "T" had not been considering that the ARES/RACES registration displays a captcha form to users who are not logged in to the site. It wasn't until "T" logged out of the site and tried to update his ARES/RACES Registration that he encountered the error and was able to fix it.

So, the moral of the story is that it can be very challenging to provide tech support while in the middle of other unrelated projects, especially for a small team of volunteers. Some valuable lessons have been learned here and apologies go out from "T" and the rest of the team to anyone who feels like they got a brushed off answer like "we tested it and it is working fine". Yes, we tested the form. No, we did not test the correct one and it took this long to catch it.

We would also like to thank everyone who helped bring this problem to our attention.

As a side note: sometime in the next week, or so, we plan to implement a helpdesk system to make support much easier on everyone.