Exercise Exercise Exercise
Objectives:
- Conduct a county-to-county message relay across the state to simulate an activation request.
- Determine a local county’s ability to establish a HF Winlink station with a served agency to allow welfare messages from their county citizens.
Scenario:
- Across Indiana we have experienced hurricane level rain and flash flooding like that of Asheville, N.C. Much like Asheville, power, utilities, transportation, cell phone, and internet services have all been lost in your county. To support your local citizens communicating their safety to family members, ARES is activating to establish HF Winlink access points to allow emails to be sent out of the impacted areas.
- The Section Emergency Coordinator will initiate an activation request with Marion County and ask that it be relayed county-to-county to Lake, Steuben, Switzerland, and Vanderburg Counties, along with over the Indiana ARES HF frequencies.
- We are asking ARES members to establish a contact point with either their local Emergency Management, Public Health Department, or the Red Cross to identify a location to establish a HF Winlink station that can allow citizens to send welfare emails to their families.
- Counties that can establish an HF Winlink station will send a message over HF Winlink confirming activation to the Indiana Section Manager (SM) and Indiana Section Emergency Coordinator (SEC).
Timeline:
The exercise will start at 8:00 AM on Saturday, October 26th and run until 10:00 AM, with an activation message delivered to Marion County to be county-by-county relayed to the corners of the state.
Reporting:
The following outlines the report to send back to the SEC on your exercise activity:
- What counties you received the activation message from
- What counties you relayed the activation message to, and the frequency used
- Who your served agency would be
- Primary station operator of the HF Winlink station
FAQ
- You can send an HF Winlink message from any location; you do not have to setup operations at a served agency.
- You will need to determine who your neighboring counties are in the direction of the final destination counties.
- For example, Tippecanoe County would try and relay the message to the the northwest. This would include Warren, Benton, White, Cass, and Carrol. If possible, attempt Newton, Jasper, Pulaski, and Fulton.
- The goal is to notify as many counties as possible in the path of the target counties, and to ultimately reach the target county.
- The intent is to contact neighboring counties on their ARES frequency. You may use any UHF or VHF means of contacting neighboring counties.
- If there is a prominent repeater in your area that covers multiple counties, it may be used to contact as many counties as possible.
- We will keep the exercise time short as not to tie up frequencies.
- If you don’t receive the activation message, still try and complete the second objective of establishing an HF Winlink station and sending a confirmation email over HF Winlink to the state SM and SEC.