The Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) // Western Pennsylvania Section // Southwest District will be conducting a simplex drill on Saturday, August 1, 2020 starting at 0945 local time. Participating Pennsylvania counties will be Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Washington, and Westmoreland.
The purpose of this drill is to test emergency communications capabilities in the event of a repeater outage. Data collected during this drill will be used to determine simplex coverage for each county.
Agenda for Drill is as follows (for Butler County):
- 0945 Net Control readies for Drill.
- 1000 Net Control Initiates Net and starts taking and logging Check-Ins on the Alameda Park Repeater (147.300 MHz, positive offset, no tone)
- 1015 Check-in’s switch to assigned county simplex frequency (see map below). In our case we will QSY to 147.57 MHz
- All stations should attempt to make as many contacts as possible on the simplex frequency. Please log all contacts.
- 1100 County Emergency Coordinator (EC) contacts neighboring county repeaters for inter-county interoperability.
- 1100 Net Control monitors and logs adjacent county EC / Assistant Emergency Coordinator (AEC) check-ins to 147.300 Repeater
- 1115 Net Control closes the Net and forwards Log to the District Emergency Coordinator (DEC). All other stations: please e-mail your log to Butler County Emergency Coordinator Bill Hastings (KB3TBT), kb3tbt@arrl.net
