ARES Simplex Drill – November 19

The Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) // Western Pennsylvania Section // Southwest District will be conducting a simplex drill on Saturday, November 19th, 2022 starting at 10:00 AM EST.  The drill will conclude at noon. 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):

• 09:45 AM Net Control readies for drill.
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• 10:00 AM Net Control initiates net and takes check-ins on the Alameda Park repeater (147.300 MHz, positive offset, PL 131.8 Hz).
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• 10:05 AM (approx.) Net control will direct all stations to switch to the assigned county simplex frequency (see map below). In our case we will QSY to 147.57 MHz.
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  • Net Control take check-ins on this frequency.
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  • Next, all stations should attempt to make as many contacts as possible with each other on this frequency. Please log all contacts.
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• 10:30 AM All stations should switch to other county simplex frequencies (see map below) and attempt to make as many contacts as possible.  Other participating counties will be Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Washington, and Westmoreland.
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• 12:00 PM Net Control closes the net.  All stations: please e-mail your log to Butler County Emergency Coordinator Bill Hastings (KB3TBT),  kb3tbt@arrl.net. Bill will forward all logs to the District Emergency Coordinator.