Marshall County Alabama 

ARES 

Simulated Emergency Test 

07 Oct 2006

First I would like to express my appreciation to everyone that came out to help at this event. It would not have been possible without all of the generous support. Since breaking my heel I have been pretty much on crutches and would not have been able to accomplish any of this without your support of the ARES organization. It was a sacrifice on everyone's part during the weekend to make this happen as a 48 hour operation on emergency power in the field. 

The District 6 EC Doug Hilton made comments on the Alabama State ARES HF net Sunday afternoon about our groups performance. He said that our county raised the bar for the level of operation and professionalism that everyone else will have to strive to meet. Our comments about problems we ran into running the State HF PSK-31 net on the assigned frequency and the interference it generated on our voice HF operations was the topic of the hour. These comments are forcing them take another look at their plans to make this work seamlessly. This is the purpose of setting up in the field and testing to make sure what they have laid out works. Another issue arose with the PSK-31 while Stan was using his laptop. The cursor would stop working every time we used PSK-31 to transmit the preamble. Fortunately we were not depending on the use of his computer at the time. Every little issue such as theses are best found now during simulations and not during actual emergencies. 

Also without the participation of the operators on the VHF nets it would not have been a success. The information the State EMA is looking for would not have been possible without you providing it. You are the eyes and the ears for the these nets. The Alabama HF nets would not have been successful without your cooperation and ground work that you do. This is a team effort and it takes everyone to make it happen. Our hats are off to you that dropped everything to drive around the county to put a eye on the areas of interest. 

We greatly appreciate the Albertville Recreation Center allowing us to use their facility for this exercise. They had a very busy schedule that weekend with 8 football games and still allowed us to have access. 

 

Again Thanks for the TEAM effort 

Bill Clingan 

KC0ONR 

Marshall County ARES Emergency Coordinator