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Followup: ACES ACT 1

Submitted by KK7DS on Sat, 2010-04-03 16:49

K7HIO participated in the ACES ACT 1 drill today.  The full set of pictures are available in the gallery.  We hit almost all of our objectives and learned a lot about operating at the new station. 

The whole K7HIO crew, EOC and Water Ops staff

Participating staff was:

  1. JD Fort, K7JDF
  2. Dan Smith, KK7DS
  3. Taylor Smith, K7TAY
  4. Ken Wilhelmi, N7QQU
  5. Nyla Whitehead, KE7UXB
  6. Coleen Overhuel, KE7SEH
  7. Bill Overhuel, KE7SEG
  8. John Hays, KD7OHK

We started the drill by paging most of the staff using our new paging system.  Everyone got the page and proceeded to the EOC:

Staff notified by pager

We immediately made contact with the Washington County EOC on the D-STAR voice repeater, and sent them a situation/activation report using Winlink over VHF packet using N7AAM's RMS station.  In all, we sent messages via:

  • Winlink VHF: Sent 26, Received 24
  • Packet: Sent 10, Received 2
  • Voice: Sent 1, Received 2
  • D-RATS: Sent 2 (1 using gateway to WL2K)
  • Winlink HF/Pactor: Received 1

 

K7TAY and KE7SEH running the Winlink station

We had some equipment issues that caused us to miss a couple of targets:

  • At 4:30pm the evening before the drill, the router on the Synopsys D-STAR repeater went down and it was too late to get into the building to reboot it.  This left us with no hi-speed connectivity and thus, could not do Winlink over the Internet with it.
  • Because it was raining, our plans to work HF from the parking lot were cut short and thus we did not make voice contact with AC1ES.

Other than that, the operation was a huge success.  In addition to activation of the City of Hillsboro EOC, we also had our Water Operations station participating.  They are unable to get into their station on the weekends, so they camped in the parking lot for a while and then came back to the EOC.

 

The event gave us a chance to test our site repeater system, and it gave everyone an opportunity to make sure they know how to program a DTCS tone into their radio.  Even with handheld radios from the Water Operations parking lot, we were able to use the repeater as a solid communications mechanism.  Specifically, it allowed us to go outside to work on HF and still be in contact with the others.