The medical and food support being provided to the many people affected by the flood disaster in Pakistan affecting six million people is being assisted by the combined efforts of radio amateurs, a group of four wheel drive enthusiasts and the Pakistan Academy of Family Physicians (PAFP). Around a quarter of the country has been affected by the floods over the last three weeks that were triggered by intense summer monsoon rainfall swelling the Indus River into Pakistan's worst ever flood. The United Nations estimates 20 million have been affected in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh provinces and 1600 lives lost.

In collaboration with the Dutch Army, DARES took part in exercise 'Civil Challenge' from June 22 to June 24, 2010. DARES' task was to establish an email link between the locations of the Army in Vught and Budel with an additional LAN-network provided at Budel for the number of users there. Six tactical email accounts, 1 in Vught and 5 in Budel were created to support the exercise.

To realise this email link, the Winlink system  with existing, new or temporary RMS Packet Gateway stations was used for this exercise. DARES also took the opportunity to organise 3 Master Classes, in which the operation and use of the VHF / UHF Winlink system was explained and demonstrated to the participants (20 in total). For DARES it was also a training exercise with an opportunity to test all their new TNC-X modems.

Aside from the obvious success on the pitch for the Region\'s Football teams, the World Cup final also marked the end of a one month standby period for HAMNET, the Emergency Communications Group of South Africa.

For the duration of the tournament , HAMNET members have been on standby ready to provide communications links from the Joint Communications Centre to anywhere where communications have been needed should there have been an incident at the event. This was no easy task with ten venues spread across the country along with many more training grounds, fan parks or other places where the thousands of tourists or fans may have gathered.

The event has been an excellent exercise in preparedness. With much gained and nothing lost. HAMNET now has two emergency units at their disposal now with one designed into a flight case in such a way that it contains just about everything one needs in a field or ops room situation. Everything is neatly contained in the case and all the plugs are ready to be connected the antennas, power supply etc that may be needed for the occasion.

Congratulations to HAMNET and South Africa for an excellent tournament. For further information on HAMNET activities contact Francois ZS6BUU

A European Emergency Radio Conference is being organised in the German town of Gross-Gerau for the weekend of 24th to 26th September 2010. Known as EuREC-DL, the conference aims to bring together Radio Amateurs and Emergency Services to show how the two groups can work together to increase the resilience of their communications.

The conference is supported by the German Red Cross, Kreisverband Groß-Gerau e.V. and more information can be found at  http://www.eurec-dl.de/