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  • Western Pennsylvania ARES Group Conducts District-Wide Simplex Drill

    From ARRL de WD1CKS@VERT/WLARB to QST on Wednesday, April 01, 2020 18:46:01
    04/01/2020

    Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) Western Pennsylvania Southwest District, which includes Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Washington, and Westmoreland counties, conducted a district-wide simplex practice drill on March 21. The exercise lasted about 4 hours, with all participants meeting on their local ARES county repeaters.

    Each county Emergency Coordinator served as net control stations, and all stations kept logs, which were to be sent to their local Emergency Coordinator for forwarding to the District Emergency Coordinator.

    All stations were asked to stay on their county simplex frequency for at least 15 minutes before going to other county simplex frequencies. After checking in on the repeater, all stations switched to their county-assigned simplex frequencies, to test the capabilities of operators and stations and their simplex operating range. In all, 162 operators participated in the drill.

    "We have received so many great comments about the drill that I plan on running it again sometime after the Simulated Emergency Test (SET) drill on April 4," Western Pennsylvania Southwest District Emergency Coordinator Terry Nemitz, KA3UTD, said. "I also heard a lot of comments about operators wanting to improve their stations. A good thing."

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