Announcements
An exam session for all license classes will be held Thursday, June 1, 2023 at 7:00 p.m at the Sheriff’s office in Logan. Follow this link to RSVP your intent to sit for the exam.
Also, I would like to congratulate KB7UOW for passing the General Class license exam at the previous session. I know he is out of the country tonight and is not able to join us, but I wanted to let the net members know.
Training
April 20 was the County EOC exercise and for for training tonight I would like to summarize how it went for us at the Newton EOC.
The County EOC staff activated the emergency tones on the BARC repeater system at 18:00 hours and commenced a roll call of operators, beginning with the city stations, followed by a call for operators not affiliated with a city or town EOC, who wanted to participate.
At the Newton EOC, KE5HHW and I were in service when the roll call began, and soon after we were joined by KF7NWA and an observer.
In addition to our check-in to the County EOC net, we opened a net for operators in Newton and surrounding area on the primary frequency we use for this net.
As part of the exercise, the county wanted a situation report from each participating station, identifying the modes of communication available to each EOC or operator, as well as the stability of utilities at the operating location. When we conducted our local roll call we were able to obtain the situation report information from the stations who checked in, but our response to the county was a response for only the EOC itself.
It was good to gather this information from the operators who checked in to our local net, as we are able to better understand the capabilities of your station should we need your assistance during an actual emergency. If you would like to share the situation report for your station please let notify me with an email to greg.fabricius@gmail.com and I will send you the categories as a reply.
Observations from the EOC:
We have two radios at the Newton EOC, one for data communications with a soundcard interface connected to a computer, and another for voice communications, but we only have one antenna at the present time. To make it quicker to transmit on either radio we have a 3 position switch connected to the antenna feed line, but it was still inconvenient when we needed to respond to a voice call at the same time we were preparing to send a data transmission.
We hope to add additional antennas in the future, but we know that we can make it work until then. As our operating procedure, we could prepare our data transmissions and hold them in the Winlink outbox. Then we can ask for voice traffic to stand by during the time we will need the antenna for the packet radio messages.
Another hurdle was related to the amount of data traffic happening during the exercise. We use a Signalink interface at the EOC, giving us the option to use the faster transmission available with VARA enabled gateways, but the only VHF VARA gateway in the valley tends to be heavily used during these exercises. Because of the high traffic situation we had to try several times to make a good connection in order to send our situation report form.
Unfortunately, I had not researched ahead of time to determine if the Signalink hardware would allow us to send packet Winlink messages, which would be helpful as there are three other VHF gateways available in the valley for the somewhat slower packet Winlink system. Since the exercise I have been able to determine what is needed in order to send both VARA and packet Winlink messages and I am in the testing stages for the EOC system.
All told, it was a great opportunity to put our communication plan to thet test. I am grateful to the operators who helped at the EOC, as well as those who checked in to our local net with a situation report.