Staffing Emergency Services

While on a tour this past week I had the opportunity to sit with a retired public health director. He drew the lucky wild card and retired just before we even knew there would be a pandemic. In his closing interview he noted specifically that he would recommend budget to plan and provide for a pandemic and mass vaccinations among other things. Prophetic.

It got me to thinking about how do you plan, budget, staff for unanticipated emergencies. Certainly you can’t hire hundreds of staff people for something that may never happen. No one has the budget for that and it would be a ridiculous waste of money.

Our conversation helped me to better understand our role as Amateur Radio Emergency Service (#ARES) volunteers and my role as Emergency Coordinator for Dane and Iowa Counties here in Wisconsin.

Staffing for emergencies seems to be all about relationships. You don’t have to “own” every resource you need but you need to foster relationships so if/when you need a particular skill set you know how to contact them and have a good idea of what kind of expertise they can bring to bear when needed.

As a group of enthusiasts we

  • play with our gear
  • we learn how to overcome problems
  • practice our craft
  • provide communications for public events
  • maintain amateur radio equipment at various public locations like hospitals, and county and state emergency operations centers and
  • attend a menu of training classes so we are knowledgeable about FEMA’s National Incident Management System

and that is just off the top of my head. And we do all this mostly for free, at least not for money.

We have radio frequencies allocated for our exclusive use across the radio spectrum enabling us to communicate across town across the continent and around the globe. We can communicate with the space station as well! It is true that during normal times those frequencies are exclusively for amateur use but there have been times (during WWII) when “our” frequencies were set aside for Federal use and we were not allowed to use them but that almost never happens and the frequencies were returned to use as soon as the war was over.

What the community gets for this group of folk out in back yards, parks, downtown and out in the hinterland “playing radio” is a stable of folk who at the drop of a hat can provide coordinated communications off-the-grid, with or without commercial power in virtually any conditions, either as primary incident communications or a secondary channel for additional communications.

It also gets a group of curious experimenters who have historically pushed the edges of how we can use radio waves for communications. We have figured out how to send email (#winlink), files, images, phone calls over radio. If needed we can set up computer networking and webcams. Even as I write this I am following the location of support vehicles for a Bike event using Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS), a radio based messaging system that we use for mobile stations to automatically report where they are on the course so we can intelligently deploy support where needed.

This is me, thinking out loud and trying to understand better why we do what we do and how we can do it better.

We Are Now Federated Using ActivityPub

What?!

There is a growing number of social media platforms that are using a protocol called ActivityPub to allow users on disconnected social networks to follow one another. You may have heard of Mastodon, an open source web service that supports ActivityPub. Others include Pixelfed, PeerTube, and Lemmy and many others. The key is that using Federated platforms you can follow and communicate with people on different systems. What would email be like if you had to have a yahoo account to send email to a yahoo user and you couldn’t email a gmail user. ActivityPub solves this problem for social media. This protocol is growing rapidly. Soon it is expected that the new social media site “Threads” by Meta will also be federated allowing users to follow accounts outside of the Meta ecosystem.

All this is to say that the Dane/Iowa County ARES/RACES site is now federated as well. If you have a social media account that allows you to follow federated accounts you can add @KB9ORN or https://kb9orn.org/author/kb9orn/ to those that you follow and every new post that we create on this site (including this one) will show up in your feed.

July 2023 In-Person Meeting Cancelled

A whole bunch of you are enjoying your summer vacays and can’t come to the July meeting anyway…so, don’t! Take the last Thursday of the month (July 27) off this month, we won’t be meeting, However….

Aug and Sept Are On!

  • August 31 – We will gather in a park and talk about and demo setting up outside. What should you bring? What should you think about? If you have solutions or questions come on down. I’ll send out a notification about Place and Time next Month
  • September 28 – Luke, KC9IFF is going to talk to us about cross-banding. What is it? Why do it? How do I do it? I saw a cross-banding presentation back in 2012, time for a reminder. We’ll be meeting at UW Space Place for that one. I’ll send out more information in September.

New AUXCOMM Class in October

Auxilliary Communications training will be available in person in October. This class adds to our credentials and expands on how we can provide additional communications capabilities during an incident. The class will be held on the weekend of October 21-22 in Oshkosh. More information can be found in the PDF, below as well as by logging to your account at https://www.trainingwisconsin.org (you do have an account don’t you!) and searching for AUXCOMM.

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No Monthly In-Person Meeting in June

We’ve got plenty to do this month what with Field Day and Horribly Hilly Hundreds so we will NOT be having our regular monthly In-Person (and Virtual) meeting on the last Thursday of the month. Since Field Day helps us to practice setting up and operating off the grid you are STRONGLY encouraged to participate (see below). Make sure July 27 is on your calendars we will plan to meet then. I’ll send out more info next month

Wisconsin ARES Store open until 24 May

Only a few days left.

Everyone,

The WI ARES / RACES store is now open for a limited time (only until May 24th) so please distribute this flyer widely and encourage everyone to place an order right away and not to procrastinate. 

There needs to be a minimum of 24 items ordered for screen printing and 18 for embroidery. 

The closure date will allow enough time for the items to be ready before Field Day. and the items can either be shipped to your home (for a fee) or you may pick them up in person from Eagle Graphics in Kaukauna’s northside industrial park along I-41.

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May 25 – Handheld Configuration Clinic

At our next meeting we’ll hold a clinic of sorts. One thing I’ve heard consistently from folk is how hard it is to configure their hand held radios. At our next meeting, May 25, at 7:00 PM, BYORTC (Bring your own radio to configure). We’ll meet at UW Space Place 2300 South Park Street, Madison. Come in the central doors and down the stairs, down the hall and Space Place is the first door on the left. If you want to join us by zoom, the connection information is below.

We’ll have software loaded and a bunch of cables and as much expertise as we can muster. We plan to have many of the local repeaters to load into your radios if you don’t already have them.

Software – Chirp as well as a number of manufacturer’s packages. Personally I can help with ICOM, Alinco, Yaesu, Kenwood and Baofeng. If we have any additional expertise out there please come along and bring your stuff.

Please also stay tuned for some additional local nets. We’ve also heard that many of our new hams don’t feel confident enough to push the mike and when they do they don’t even hear crickets. We hope to add some new no-judgement nets that are informal and friendlier to new hams so they can get experience and confidence with their newly configured radios. We will welcome some of our more experienced hams to listen in and respond when the calls are made to the repeater. Can anybody find me some Elmers?

More to come. Stay tuned.

Winlink Presentation Feb 23, 2023

At our monthly meeting on Feb 23 we revisited Winlink. Jeff, KC9UNZ lead the presentation with help from Tom, W9TDP sending winlink messages from Florida. Please see below for a recording of the presentation, and link to the slide deck and a note about the winlink error we ran into.

From time to time when starting an RF session on winlink, if you get the computer port incorrect (in the case of tonight’s presentation it was a packet Winlink session) the program will hang if it is the incorrect port. Sometimes the session will time out and let you go back to settings and correct your port, but, sometimes it just freezes forever and makes you look stupid during a presentation! I am including a link to a post that shows you how to clear the lock and try again (this time with a different port).

Winlink Presentation Slide Deck

Video of Winlink Presentation

Fixing the Port Freeze

Here is where you can find information about fixing the frozen port: https://jeffrey.fillian.com/2023/03/20/help-my-winlink-packet-session-froze-because-my-port-was-wrong/