Add Some Exercise To Your Next Exercise

Here’s one I wish I’d thought of:

I’m not sure the ham I learned this from, Jim Fey, KO6UW, made it up—the idea is so good that I was amazed it wasn’t a standard part of ARES lore. But, since I can’t find it mentioned, I will credit Jim, who leads the Manteca (CA) ACS group with the brainstorm. (He is also one of my AEC’s in the spirit of ACS/RACES & ARES cooperation).

His great idea: Have the mobile operators report all emergency vehicles they see—police, fire, EMS—back to net control. That simple activity turned what would have been a boring exercise into a good training event. And it impressed our served agency.

This happened last week. Several agencies were holding a flood evacuation exercise and hams—for the first time in several years—were invited to participate. This was on Wednesday from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. so we were very pleased to have 14 hams involved.

In a real flood, the hams would be the eyes of the EOC. We’d be driving around reporting on flooding, evacuation traffic, and generally looking for problems the EOC needed to know about. For the drill, Jim sent our mobile hams to assigned locations. While this proves we can drive our cars and find intersections (given a small map), it doesn’t do much more.

So, to make things interesting, Jim asked the mobiles to report to Net Control every time a police, fire, or EMS vehicle passed their location. With the drill going on, Jim knew the vehicles would be driving around. As soon as the mobiles got to their posts, the reports started coming in.

Not just emergency vehicles, but our operators were reporting school buses, city trucks, police motorcycles, and anything else “official-looking” that happened to pass by. Sometimes the reports would track the vehicles from one of our posts to the next. One of the posts was near the corporation yard, where city vehicles are kept, and another near the bus barn for the public school system.

This created nearly constant traffic on the net, with a responable amount of doubling and other minor problems. These were quickly handled with a little on-air education for the operators, who responded perfectly. Net Control (me) came down with writer’s cramp from logging all the reports. Good experience all around.

As we always warn our operators, ham radio can be (and is) widely listened-to. And such was the case at the EOC, where members of served agencies got to hear our traffic and were impressed by how professionally our “amateurs” worked together.

By adding a ton of traffic to an otherwise pretty boring drill, KO6UW made certain our operators would have a good learning experience. And our served agencies heard an example of how ham radio can “do the job” when called upon.

And that’s about as good an exercise as you can have. (This drill was used as our 2008 Simulated Emergency Test).