Emergency Communications

Mike Neilsen, W1MPN writes:

Please stand down from storm preparation activities, except specific areas along the coast, at the discretion of South Shore, Bristol, and Cape/Islands DECs. Hurricane Isabel has crossed the 75th meridian and is in the process of making landfall on the North Carolina Outer Banks. [Full story]

Members of the Cape Cod ARES will conduct a summer communications exercise Saturday, July 19. The exercise, dubbed “Operation Long Haul” will test the ability of “EOCs, three field teams and multiple zone-based home relay stations to provide general communcations and relay coverage of the operational zones.” See http://ares.ema.arrl.org/article.php?sid=105 for the details.

Members of the Cape Cod ARES [held its] summer communications exercise Saturday, July 19. The exercise, dubbed “Operation Long Haul” will test the ability of “EOCs, three field teams and multiple zone-based home relay stations to provide general communcations and relay coverage of the operational zones.”

According to Cape and Islands District Emergency Coordinator Frank O’Laughlin, WQ1O, the exercise will utilize high frequency Near Vertical Incidence Skywave (NVIS), VHF/UHF FM and SSB. O’Laughlin adds, “we’ll attempt communications with other ARES districts if the opportunity arises.”

The drill will be the first CCARES exercise in which a field team conducts an NCS operation on the 6 meter band.

A description of Operation Long Haul can be found in the ARES web site links under “Departments/Programs | Training”.

The Falmouth ARA will feature a presentation by Eastern Mass. Section Emergency Coordinator Mike Neilsen, W1MPN, at its May 29, 2003 meeting. ARRL Section Manager Phil Temples, K9HI will also attend.

FARA meets monthly on the last Thursday of the month at 7:30 p.m. at the Falmouth Town Hall in the Selectman’s meeting room (downstairs, east end of the building). Ample parking is available. —www.falara.org

The ARES Net Posponed to Next Sunday April 27th, at the same time 2000. This is pending approval by the MMRA Board. There will be a confirmation message during the week. -W1MPN, EMa SEC

W1MPN writes:

“On Monday, April 21st, the Boston Marathon will be held again this year. For the second consecutive year, all public safety efforts will be coordinated by the Unified Command Center (UCC), which will be hosted in the State Emergency Operations Center in Framingham.

I am requesting that all RACES/ARES nets in the EMa Section be activated on a standby basis from approximately 0800 to 1800. The sole purpose of the activation is to provide support communications for any incidents to the community at large (outside of the race course) that may occur during the event day, either as a result of an incident within the race, or independent of it. [Full story]

***** Special Message from the ARES Leadership *****
***** Request Widest Dissemination *****

This is a special message from your leadership which we have delayed transmitting until after the President’s address this evening.

There are significant events which seem to be on everyone’s mind, and what we should do about it. War and any domestic ramifications will affect us first as citizens, then as ham radio operators. First, it is important to remember that we are not first responders, as that duty is remains with Fire, Police, and humanitarian professionals such as the American Red Cross. We may, however, be called upon to support those agencies at any time if they are faced with communication issues. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the federal government will require any extraordinary restrictions in our frequency bands, but we may have to sacrifice some of our UHF space as some of it is granted on a shared basis with the government. In view of the circumstances of a foreign war, and the raising of the domestic terrorist warning level to Orange, we are asking you accomplish three important activities as soon as you can.First, secure your home and family. Make sure you have food and water for at least three days for each of your family members. Plan on filling your car gas tanks when your car is about half full, instead of letting it get lower, etc. These are just a few of the many steps you can take to become better prepared for any possible impact on your community. You can learn about this and many other great suggestions on the FEMA website, on http://www.ready.gov , or http://www.fema.gov/library/prepandprev.shtm. There are numerous pamphlets you can pull down for you and your family to read.

Next, make sure your home station is working well. Please remember that the dispersion of our members throughout our districts and the section could come in very handy during any failure of the communication infrastructure providing vital communication links. We now anticipate that hams will be most active as home relay stations as our movements may be restricted within our localities. An emergency can develop very quickly and without any notice. Please focus on your home station making sure it works well, and you have adequate alternative power resources. Then check your mobile station to ensure you can communicate on simplex frequencies properly. You may be needed while you are commuting to and from work, or running errands. Please carry your handheld units with you at all times when the level is raised to Orange, as we anticipate it will be sometime this week [we have been at Orange level since 3/17]. Finally, if the incident lasts for a while or there is a significant restoration element involved such as with the Red Cross, we may be needed to serve away from our homes. In that case, your prior preparations are key. Your technical and personal go-kits will need to be ready before, and not during the emergency. We will have some great information on our website to assist you in the next few days.

In the meantime, go about your lives as best you can. Your leadership has been working with RACES, the Commonwealth, and public service agencies such as the Red Cross to make sure we are ready as we can be for whatever may come along. We can be thought of as the 21st century New England patriots working in our proverbial fields with our proverbial muskets at the ready. We may or may not be asked to serve, but it is high honor to be trained and willing to do so. I speak for the ARES leadership when I say that we greatly appreciate your preparation and commitment.

Here is a brief summary of activities that are scheduled in the next few months. On Saturday, March 29, we will having another ARES workshop on Cape Cod, in Sandwich MA at the Oakridge School. It is just 10 minutes from the Sagamore Bridge, so consider joining us. We’ve updated the program to offer more field related activities, and to better dovetail with the League’s Emergency Communication Course offerings. So, if you’ve haven’t joined us yet, or it’s been a few years since you attended, please plan on joining us. Simply contact your DEC or me to indicate your interest to attend. There is plenty of room at the school, and of course, there is no charge except a
contribution for lunch.

We are also planning a follow on exercise to the February exercise on Saturday April 26. This exercise will allow continual practice of important skills, but will have more emphasis on local operations to allow us to hone skills of communicating with neighboring stations. Some inter-district comms will still be asked for as well, as well as the passing of some NTS traffic. A preliminary message will be released shortly.

We are about to enter the busy Public Service Event (PSE) season. Please consider volunteering for duty with some of these events, as they offer an opportunity to practice communicating in more difficult conditions, and under personal pressure. Its great preparation for any emergency event, particularly if you have little practice or experience. You’ll hear more on this email reflector and on our website.

On behalf of my staff, I wish you and your families the best in the coming months. If you have a service member deployed in a foreign theatre as I do, best wishes for their safety and swift return home. 73,

s/Michael P. Neilsen
Michael P. Neilsen, W1MPN
EMa SEC
978.562.5662 Admin
978.389.0558 FAX/Secondary

Hello to all…

Some time has passed since most of you submitted your contact and capabilities information. For many of you, that was well over a year ago. Please take a few mintues to submit any updated information since you filed your last application. It is very important that we get your current email address, as we are planning to migrate away from this site and set up new email address list later this year.How you do it is up to you. You can simply submit by return email pertinent updates to home address, email address, pager, cell phone, work phone, etc., brag, I mean, inform us of your changes in equipment, and if you have upgraded your license. We would also like to know what CCE courses you’ve completed or are working on. I prefer email, but you can fax or leave a voice mail 24/7 with your info at 978.389.0558.

Or, if it is more convenient for you, please use the updated EMa ARES application form in the “files” area of this website (Mass RAS Gen) to update any or all of the information requested on it.

Please accept my thanks in advance for your efforts. The leadership will be meeting next Saturday (3/15) to discuss, among other things, our membership and how to reach everybody during a crisis. I would like to have as fresh a list as possible for them.

One more request. When you submit your information, please send to w1mpn@arrl.net putting the word “Update” in the subject area. This will allow my mail program to sort the responses from my other email. Please also copy your DEC and EC as well. Obviously, if we haven’t talked to you in a while, this is a great way to reintroduce yourself.

Thanking you again…73,

Michael P. Neilsen, W1MPN
Eastern Massachusetts
Section Emergency Coordinator

A revision to the 2/8/03 Exercise Plan has been announced by the EMA ARES leadership. See http://ares.ema.arrl.org/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=310801&page_id=36 for the details.

Hello to all…

The monthly ARES Net will be held this Sunday 1/19 at 2000 (8pm) on the MMRA network, or after the weekly Youth Net secures. For information on the MMRA network, please press the “EMa ARES Overview” button, and click on the MMRA link within. Please press the “read more” button.Although this change has been announced previously, we wanted to remind you again of the change, particularly the new time. These changes were in response to comments made by many of you, and we hope you like the result. Additionally, our long time net control and congenial host, Bill, N1VUX, is not available at this new time slot. Please join me in thanking Bill for his long dedicated service to the ARES net. I will be Net Control (NC) for the next few months, while we establish a schedule of NC’s. Please consider NC’ing this net on a rotating basis with other volunteers in the months to come.

We are making some changes to the venerable net, and more in the near future. The monthly ARES Net purpose is to practice making an ARES call to volunteers during an emergency/exigency, and then receiving checkins of volunteering ARES members, and other interested hams. As in the real situation, we will ask hams to check in with call, name, location of station or location if mobile/portable, and power source, as we have before. And as with past practice, it is important that you allow pauses in your transmissions to allow priority break-ins, and the network to drop/refresh properly. In a real world situation, you would check in the MMRA network FIRST to relieve congestion on the area RACES repeaters, so this monthly net is practice for that as well. We are exploring the use of internet based protocols such as IRLP and Echolink, to expand our net to the entire section as soon as we can.

We are asking you to add one important new item to your checkin. Please indicate whether you have priority traffic to pass to the net control. In an actual exigency, priority traffic would be involve any important information that must be passed to net control and cannot wait for the completion of check-in’s or a roll call. The traffic could be a fresh incident report, a report of major damage, or a high priority agency request. In a real situation, you must use your best judgment on what is priority information, with net control then deciding how to handle your information and when to continue the checkin. In the real situation, you would receive important information in the net concerning the exigency, directions for mobilization (or standby information), and staging/rendezvous points when the mobilization begins.

Since there will not be this activity in the monthly net (unless we have an exercise), we will substitute other activities. Changes will be announced in the future, but for this month we will:

Run two or more rounds of check-ins
Make brief announcements
SEC’s monthly comments
Contributors comments. KC1US will be a regular contributor of brief PSE announcements with website references for details
Roundtable discussion. This month’s topic will be the February 8th exercise.

A procedural note. If the network experiences problems, we will ask you to shift to the next repeater west of your location to attempt to maintain contact. For example, if Quincy 146.67 would fail, shift to Quincy 224.4 or Weston 146.82. If Stoughton 146.715 would fail, shift to 446.725 or west to Marlboro 146.61, 449.925, 53.81 repeaters. Same procedure for those south using Shrewsbury and Hopkinton repeaters to move north.

I look forward to talking to you on the net. 73,

Michael P. Neilsen, W1MPN
Section Emergency Coordinator
Eastern Massachusetts Section
Pager: 1-800-759-8888 PIN 1155084
Admin: w1mpn (symbol for at) arrl.net
978-562-5662 Primary/Voice Mail
978-389-0558 FAX/ EFax Voice Mail

W1MPN writes:

EMa ARES has now shifted its monthly net to the third Sunday of every month, starting at 2000 (8pm) on the Minuteman Repeater Association linked repeater system following the weekly Youth Net.

73,

Michael P. Neilsen, W1MPN
Section Emergency Coordinator
Eastern Massachusetts Section
Pager: 1-800-759-8888 PIN 1155084
Admin: w1mpn (symbol for at) arrl.net
978-562-5662 Primary/Voice Mail
978-389-0558 FAX/ EFax Voice Mail