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 #HamRadio 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 #AmateurRadio 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.
3 responses to “Setting Up Outside Show and Tell”
I have a hard hat. Never throught to bring it. I have steel toe boots too which might come in handy. I do have a large amount of equipment to bring, but it often gets trimmed to meet the needs of my role. A list of what to bring for different assignments would be good. I forgot to mention that I also have a pair of FRS radios. Store batteries in a baggie with the light/radio etc., with all of it in a second baggie. This will protect the equipment if the batteries leak.
Might come in handy when working with non-hams.
Look for Public Safety Library in either the Apple App Store or the Android App Store. From the Library, I have downloaded, ‘Wisconsin Interoperable Communications Field Operations Guide’, ‘National Interoperability Field Operations Guide’, and ‘Auxillary Communications Field Operations Guide’. aka WI eFOG, eNIFOG, and eAUXFOG. Open each one while you have WiFi access; the files will download and you will have them when you need them in the field.
Here’s my take aways:
Put a Hard Hat in my go kit.
Make a list of stuff to take with me… I can’t set aside stuff just for deployment so I found I forgot obvious stuff for our evening I need to create a go kit list
Deployment manuals can be found by installing the Public Safety Library app on Iphone or android. (More on this later)
Bring a camp chair
WEM Go-Kits can be requested through the county EOC.
Everyone should create a Winlink Account. There are two parts to Winlink. You can create an account and install the software and use WinLink WITHOUT a radio. Create an account and get familiar with the software. Once you get that down, then wrestle with doing RF winlink (because wrestle you will!)