eHam
eHam Forums => Emergency Communications => Topic started by: WD8DBY on April 24, 2022, 02:43:47 PM
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If you had an opportunity to recommend ideas for a large-scale, multi-agency, emergency communications and radio-only interoperability exercise in October, what would you recommend?
Asking for a friend...
Paul
WD8DBY
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A satphone. Preferably two.
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A plane crash over shallow water... bay or river perhaps. It gets a lot of agency's involved.
-Mike.
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For realism it depends where you live. Choose a major event that your region might actually face, not a made-up highly unlikely scenario. Agencies probably would not participate otherwise.
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WOW...What a hot topic this is! ;)
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I would recommend getting a representative from each organization together for a meeting to brainstorm.
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Any scenario could work as long as it's "scripted" properly.
So do something fun with it.
Back when I was active in that, ours was ALWAYS a weather scenario .... with just check-ins and wx reports.
Of course it was boring as crap, very few participated ( to the constant surprise of the EM ::) ) and those that did, checked in and then vanished.
Do a "scripted" event ... Godzilla, zombies or aliens attacking etc. and have scheduled incidents along the way to keep people interested and involved.
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Failure of the GPS network, either by a solar outburst, or a rogue state.
Some telecom systems used to rely on timing reference from GPS and fell apart when their GPS receivers failed. I would hope things have changed since I retired from the industry in 2010, but I’m not betting on it.
A failure of the GPS system scenario would cause the agencies to research how reliant they are on that single point of failure.
You could throw in a ship wreck too, as many mariners rely heavily on GPS navigation.
73 Dave
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This really depends on your current infrastructure and how the current inner-operability works. If you are in a state like Ohio where EVERYONE is on a single radio system, and you can simply switch the knob and zone and be on a common channel, then you need to mimic a system failure in the middle of your exercise. Firemen can at least change a channel. They have a dispatch and several fireground channels typically. Police... you get assigned a patrol zone the first day and never leave it, you never leave the channel, for 20 years. Finding the ITAC and ICALL zone in the radio should produce some high comedy. And you need to dictate the cell network being down at the start of the exercise as well. What the actual situation this is wrapped around isn't relevant. Plane crash, housing development on fire, hazardous waste spill, have the fire people pick that. The communications is what you need to be concerned with. Unless you are a fire guy, and then you pick... but it still don''t matter. The last one I was part of was a plane crash with fire in a housing development. Large wreckage field with multiple sites of damage. IC announced 1 hour in that the radio system had failed and they needed to work out communications on an alternate system or repeater. ANd fall back to simplex operations for the fireground operations. Of course there was some confusion and cross talk until they got each fireground on a separate simplex channel, and IC needed to assign a communications officer and command channel for teh chief's to use to communicate back to IC but it got squared away and they made it work. Public safety communications is a funny thing. They just expect it to work and when it don't it becomes very confusing. As hams we just know to spin the dial and where to go. Public safety guys don't necessarily KNOW how that all works. And when you have 36 zones in a radio with 16 channels per zone. It becomes even more confusing. Because their radios may have every other button worn clean from use except that zone button. That one is a scary rabbit hole for many.
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If you had an opportunity to recommend ideas for a large-scale, multi-agency, emergency communications and radio-only interoperability exercise in October, what would you recommend?
Asking for a friend...
Paul
WD8DBY
That's an easy one!
Get the ARRL to suggest standardizing the MF/HF phone bands (with the rest of the entire MF/HF communications world) by recommending the use of USB for normal phone operations as well as strongly recommending all nets operate using USB so as to be actually ready for the "emergency traffic" they're always giving lip service to.
(And like I indicated in another thread, please note that I said "recommend" and not "mandate"....because they can do it now if desired)
73/Rick
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A room to put ham radio operators in to keep them out of the way.