Wel­come to GAREC-2009 ! 

The Fifth Glob­al Ama­teur Radio Emer­gency Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (GAREC) Con­fer­ence will be held on 24 — 25 August 2009, in con­nec­tion with the JARL Ham Fair at Tokyo Big Sight, Ari­ake, Tokyo Japan. (22 — 23 August 2009) The Japan Ama­teur Radio League (JARL) hosts the Conference. 

The Theme of the GAREC-2009 will be “Emer­gency Com­mu­ni­ca­tions across Bor­ders”. The pro­gram will include pre­sen­ta­tions about oper­a­tions dur­ing dis­as­ters that occurred since last year’s con­fer­ence and dis­cus­sions about new devel­op­ments in tech­nol­o­gy and their appli­ca­tion in emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tions. The detailed pro­gram will be pub­lished in late April. 

All Ama­teur Radio Oper­a­tors inter­est­ed in Emer­gency Com­mu­ni­ca­tions are invit­ed to par­tic­i­pate. The fifth GAREC con­tin­ues the work of its four fore­run­ners: After the first and the sec­ond GAREC in Tam­pere, Fin­land, the third GAREC in Huntsville, Alaba­ma, USA, and the fourth GAREC in 2008 in Friedrichshafen, Ger­many, this year’s event will be the first GAREC con­fer­ence in IARU Region 3. The pro­ceed­ings and the state­ments of the 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 con­fer­ences can be found at the GAREC web site indi­cat­ed below. Emer­gency Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions are, by the way, also the theme of this year’s World Ama­teur Radio Day (WARD-09) on 18 April, see http://www.iaru.org/worldAmRadioDay.html.

The Orga­niz­ing Com­mit­tee for GAREC-2009 con­sists of Sep­po Sisat­to OH1VR, and Jay Oka JA1TRC. Mem­bers of the Pro­gram Com­mit­tee are Kei­go Komuro JA1KAB, Jim Lin­ton VK3PC, and Hans Zim­mer­mann, F5VKP/HB9AQS. Reg­is­tra­tion will start ear­ly May. 

For details please vis­it the GAREC web-site at URL http://www.rientola.fi/oh3ag/garec/index.html.