IS 100, 200, 700 and 800 here.

73
Steve, KC5SAS
Iberville Parish RACES Officer

Oh good grief. OK, I'll ask....What the heck is FLARQ? You throw out an acronym like that without any discription, explination or even a URL to a website set up for whatever it is? 

I've worked this event for several years, often being stationed at intersections in the Amite/Kentwood areas although last year I was at Independance HS on Saturday and for the first time they put a rest stop at my usual Sunday location at Hwy 16 west of Amite. God it was nice being a rest stops instead of by myself along the course.  I have always run APRS while participating in this event.  After the last rider passes my station I always shut down with permission of Net Control and trail the last rider into the next stop.  Anyone with access to Wi-Fi or a Internet card (Sprint or AT&T) should be able to track my mobile as I move along the course by simply going to the aprs.fl website.  Yes there are some dead spots in the trees where the digis don't pick up well but for the most part APRS should work over most of the course.  Either way you won't be the only person running APRS at this event. 
See ya in October.  
My car at the MS bike-a-thon in 2009 at Hwys 43 and 16, COMMUNICATIONS magnet provided by SELARC-
(http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m229/cellblock776/07mstour4.jpg)
My car parked somewhere near Husser at a intersection during the 2009 MS tour-
(http://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m229/cellblock776/07mstour1.jpg)

QUOTE-As far as I knew, we never were Red Cross volunteers. We were a cooperating agency and fully kept our identities. -UNQUOTE

Exactily.  When shelters open here and I am deployeed it is as a RACES member. I am covered under the insurance and policies of he OEP I serve.  I make it clear that I'm not a Red Cross volunteer but am there to assist them as a seperate agency.  No different than the police officer assigned to provide security or the firefighter/EMT assigned to provide EMS aid if needed.

Steve
RACES Officer
Iberville Parish, La

More correctly, ARES® is a ARRL Field Orginzation and is registered as a Trademark by them.
73,
Steve
An ACS/RACES Officer for my Parish EMA but who is not involved in ARES® in any way.

PS- FEMA has little to support RACES but there is an old guide they used to put out on RACES though its a bit out of date. You can find a PDF of it here- http://www.harfordemcomm.org/files/fema_races.pdf As i said, it was put together in 1991 and some things have changed. For example, it lists freqs which RACES stations would be limited to when the Prez declares an emergency.  That section is no longer valid.  
Still, the bulk of the manual is a good way for a new RACES Officer to get an idea of what the government indended with the program.  It also includes a sample RACES plan which can be copied and modified by others wanting to submit a RACES plan for their local EMA.  This is the basis I used when designing our RACES plan except for inclusions for GMRS and CB radio service stuff as we were presenting a Aux Comm Service (ACS/RACES) model.  

There is no National RACES organization.  The first link you posted was to a page put up by someone representing RACES in the state of Virginia. The second link was to a page put up by ARRL.  
As stated before, all RACES is local. Sign up, train up and hope you are never called up.

Steve
RACES Officer
Iberville Parish, La.  

<<<<Steve,
It's a shame hams don't step up to the plate. Are the background check and training requirements cost free to the hams? If so, hams don't have a beef.

Scott
NA4IT >>>>

Yes, background check and training cost nothing.  The Parish requires ALL emergency responders, and anyone else who would be called to a scene or to the EOC, to have Incident Command System/NIMS training.  That means everyone from police and volunteer firefighters to public works and even elected officials.  (Yes Mr Mayor, you and the guy who drives the frontend loader have to sit in on the class.)  Classes are held at the EOC on a weekend and the OEP provides refreshments.  
Additionally, the OEP Director recognises training based on the ARRL Emcomm classes or the REACT Emcomm course.  We use a powerpoint course put together by the President of the Baton Rouge Amateur Radio Club which covers most of the relavant material found in those courses.  We then add a little material specific to our operations. Takes about a day.  Again, free. Can be done at the EOC and my OEP director has no problem supplying snacks.
We've advertised via local nets, announcements/articles written by the OEP director in the local paper and I even mailed out 45 letters to area hams after a database search.
Nothing. Nada.
We have our old station packed away somewhere. It wasn't licensed as a RACES station.  We operated it under the call-W5ACY.
From QRZ-
"W5ACY is the new call sign for the Iberville Parish Amateur Radio Emergency Group and is permanently located at the Iberville Parish EOC of the Emergency Preparedness Office of the Parish of Iberville in Plaquemine, LA. The amateur radio station is a Memorial Station dedicated to Samuel G. Daigre, original licensee of W5ACY, now a Silent Key, and long-time ham operator in Plaquemine, LA. W5ACY will be used for any area emergency that may arise where hams are able to assist in communications."
What if we need new stuff? Grants are there to buy radio equiptment.  Our OEP director is willing to get the money but only after we have the bodies to operate the equiptment. She's not willing to buy the gear if hams no longer come out to use it.
I see this as a Failure of Ham Radio.

Steve, KC5SAS
ACS/RACES Officer
Iberville Parish, La.

Our Parish ACS/RACES plan does not mention repeaters at all.  Only simplex frequiencies are listed. People have depended on repeaters too much lately.  They forget the range you can get using VHF and UHF simplex with a decent antenna and radio.  

Oh for goodness sake.  If they wre involved and able to call she would have heard from them already.  If they were involved and dead, or critical, they would not have heard her plea. What a waste of airtime.  

<<<My personal policy with folks like this is ...

No training?
No drill and exercise participation?
NO communications deployment!

However, folks to make coffee, run errands, empty the wastbaskets and sweep floors are always needed.

73,

Lon - W3LK
Baltimore, Maryland - soon to be Naugatuck, Connecticut >>>>>>>>>>>

My policy also.  

Steve- KC5SAS
Iberville Parish, Louisiana

Well, there's no ARES® locally and nobody is interested in signing up for the ACS/RACES group with the OEP.
Katrina did more harm than good in regards to getting volunteers for EMCOMMS. Most hams I've spoken with who did any comms after Katrina have sworn off ever participating in such activites again afer several bad experiances with supported agencies and their missions.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it,
Katrina taught us nothing we didn't already know and had been saying for years. All Katrina did was amplify problems we already had and knew about.
When I sat in a shelter assisting special needs evacuees back during Hurricane Georges in 1998 we knew we had a probelm with evacing and finding beds for nursing home residents and the poor.  Promises were made to fix this and then forgotten.
Tropical Storm Isidore and Hurricane Lili in 2002 showed us other weakneses such as flooding and the need to fix contraflow problems on the highways.  We also knew that using the Superdome was a bad idea after it was looted by evacuees who used this "Shelter of last resort". We knew then that getting people out of New Orleans was better than leaving them there and we had time to prepare but nothing was done.  Others mentioned these problems in hopes changes would occur including this blog- http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2002-10-15/commentary.html . That was written in October 2002.  When Katrina hit we were in virtually the same condition.
Heck, the article even mentions the lack of adaquate building codes which we are still struggling over today.
Even so called "relief agencies" were aware of the problems but did little to fix them.  
The Baton Rouge area chapter of the Red Cross, after Lili, had formed a positive relationship with local hams, had installed radio equiptment at its chapter building and was working on identifying additional shelters and getting volunteers trained. When the chapter president was replaced by someone from the New Orleans Chapter things turned completely around.  The new president dismissed the Hams, had the radio station and all equiptment removed from the chapter and cut ties with many of those who had years of experiance volunteering during storms. When Katrina hit, evacuees flooded into the Baton Rouge area and the local Red Cross Chapter was virtually paralized in it's operations from lack of trained volunteers or planning.  No big suprise there. Those that did come out to help found the complete confusion to be further evidence that local government and private agencies are all talk and no action regarding preparing for and responding to emergencies likely to occur.  
And don't get me started on 9/11. Frigging Condi Rice telling reporters after the attack that "nobody could have forseen the use of hijacked airliners as missles".  PULESE!  
Six months before the attack the X-Files spin off The Lone Gunmen used a plot to crash an airliner into the WTC to expand the military industrial complex as part of it's pilot episode.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen_(TV_series)
Heck, after the shootings at Columbine police found a diary belonging to the shooters detailing plans to hijack a plane and crash it into New York.
So 2 loosers from Colorado can come up with this scenerio but the people in charge of our national security can stand at a podium and claim to be completely blindsided to terrorists doing something like this? Give me a break.  

I have no doubt that the "next Katrina or 9/11" will be just a big of a Chinese Firedrill as these events were.
Can you say New Madrid faultline?

I simply don't think that these radios are the ones we had hoped would replace the D700.  
As I wrote in another forum regarding a replacement for the TM-D700...
"I'm hoping to see a prototype of the replacement for the Kenwood TM-D700 dual band APRS mobile rig. Last year, at the TAPR conference, Kenwood met and discussed features that some would like to see in this new radio. Personally I like the TM-D700 but an obvious improvement would include built in GPS to eliminate having to wire one up externally.  Combine this with a color display and street level maping and I'd be standing in line for that radio.  
Kenwood has teamed up with other manufatures to make APRS add-ons which are easy to use with their radios but a Mobile and Handheld with the features built in would be great rigs.
Uniden already has a VHF Marine band radio with built in map and APRS like station/vehicle tracking capablilties. It's called the "Uniden Mystic" and a quick Google search turns up lots to read about this radio.  
For years Gramin has marketed a series of radios using FRS and GMRS channels which incorporate built-in GPS and mapping. Called the "Garmin Rhino" these radios have many of the features I want to see in a new radio which could replace the Kenwood TM-D700."

KD5PKS said-
"Where I am located, the local DHS requests that ARC open a shelter. They may or may not ask us to deploy to the shelter or other locations. We never have any direct contact with ARC for the most part and volunteer at the discretion of the OEP director. Why is it that when ARES is asked by DHS to provide communications to an ARC shelter are we then ARC volunteers? When they ask the sheriff to send a deputy for security, why is the deputy still working for the sheriff and not the ARC? "
Thake the quote above, Change ARES to RACES/ACS and I've said the same thing before.  
Agreed.  I'm not a ARC volunteer.  I am a RACES/ACS operator and am there as a a representive of my OEP.