One of the primary roles of MARS is to support federal disaster relief efforts with a pool of trained operators who additionally have passed a background check.   In many rural states like mine many of the Federal SHARES systems nodes are MARS stations as there is a very limited full time federal presence.

Most of the traffic handling is now digital and unless one is active on the TRANSCON digital net's one will not see much traffic other than local as the digital nets have become the preferred method of handling traffic as opposed to voice.   In fact extra participation is awarded for transferring traffic to/from the digital nets.

We still do morale and welfare traffic especially for marine and aviation units as satellite space is limited and morale traffic is handled only when there is no mission traffic on the links.

MARS is also part of the NCS

National Communication System
The SHARES HF radio system is an initiative by the National Communications System (NCS) to establish a national HF radio capability using existing Federal resources to provide backup HF radio communications in support of  National Security and Emergency Preparedness. SHARES was approved by the Executive Office of the President in January 1989. SHARES further implements Executive Order No. 12472, “Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Telecommunications Functions” dated April 3, 1984.

No we are not activated often but we have been activated in the past and will be in the future.  In NH  Flooding took out several Verizon CO's and MARS provided 911 service between the affected areas and the  NH EOC and 911 centers.

As MARS moves forward and becomes a joint service program with all the services combining forces I'm pretty sure MARS will become much more active than it currently is.

The region one net usually has between  20-40 participants on any given night and more if widespread IMC is on it's way

Scott AFA1JN USAF MARS

This sounds like a old VHF TV transmitter the specs and construction would be right for an old Harris or RCA backup transmitter.   Bit of tweaking and the PA stage would be more or less resonant at 28 Mhz

Use the 'international' frequencies they are in the ham band away from the AMSAT freq  Chan Id's 12-15 are available 2467-2484 Mhz.   There is also Ch 0 at 2406 Mhz

This has a plus as if a 'experimenter' wanders up here they can be legitimately requested to leave.

The "box" is a service from Cisco called the NERV it has a satellite link and one of the IC-1000's.

On the ARC's policy on background checks

Criminal - Ok
Credit by random LLC not ok

IF the ARC directly checked the bureau's not a problem as if my information leaked it would be the ARC's responsibility to remediate but having a random dot.com check and hold financial information for sale to the highest bidder then I think I will just pass and concentrate on MARS instead.