SET News
Juan II News
The information below is for a test or drill and not an actual event


The major flood impact from Juan II will center within a radius of about 50 miles of downtown Roanoke.  Flood conditions are less serious as we move away from this impact zone.  The ARC chapters from 50 to 175 miles from Roanoke will be providing support to the areas where flooding has overwhelmed local resources.  This may include sending hams to function as a Rapid Emergency Deployment teams.  Others will be serving as SKYWARN reporting stations.  These SKYWARN hams may also be ask to go out and report back on stream, river and roadways from the field.  Shelters and the regional Red Cross office may loose power, Internet and all phone service.  This would require the impact area to send "Safe and Well" reports to outlying areas via Winlink to be entered into the system via active Internet connections.  Sheltering support in the way of material and personnel would also need to be ordered via Amateur Radio.  Mass feeding support may be required from special feeding units located from outside the impact area. 

Government Agencies may have to depend on Amateur Radio resources for long haul messaging to secure additional rapid water rescue boats with crews,  All areas within 50 miles of Roanoke will have their resources committed to dealing with their own local flooding.  There may be a need to bring in additional law enforcement to control vandalism when whole neighborhoods and business districts are evacuated.  Air rescue may be required when people have retreated to their roof and the water continues to rise and threaten to cover the roofs.

The cut-off date for agency registration will be October 1, 2013.  Hams may register through October 10th.  We need to do this to ensure time to complete messaging and ham radio operators assignment areas.  Non-hams that will be participating with agencies do not need to register.  Just the agency location where the non-hams are working will need to register.

Tuesday, October 1st at midnight will be the deadline for agencies to signup for the Simulated Emergency Test.  October 10th at midnight is the last day for hams to sign up.  After Oct.1st, we will begin to assign all ham stations that are unassigned a service location.  We will begin to send out packets of messages for each location by mid October.  This will be sent out via email for each registered location.  If you will be using Winlink, place these on a thumb drive or CD to take to your assigned station.  If you plan to use voice,  print your messages out.  Have blank forms for answering incoming messages.  If you plan to use agency ham equipment, check it out prior to the day of the drill to ensure that it is working in a proper way.

We are only 10 days away from our SET.  I plan to send updates to those that are registered for the event on a regular basis, up to the day of the SET.  If you notice that someone has registered and are not included in the address list, send me their name and email address.  I will be working up an Address Book to put in your Winlink program.  This file will be sent to all persons on this list.  This will include the Winlink address and location of the Winlink station.  You will have other hams in these locations that will be doing other functions such as voice operation, logging, acting as a runner, etc.  If you have traffic for that ham, you may send it via Winlink to the location or you can send it via voice.

I am composing a series of messages (10) for each location.  I will send this as an attachment to an email sent to those that will be working at each location.  Some of the messages will be in an ICS-213 text format.  Others will be the Red Cross, "Safe and Well" messages.  These "Safe and Well" messages are about all the outgoing type information.  The most efficient method to handle these would be to use Winlink.  If you do not have Winlink at your location, then you would need to send by voice.  If possible move off a busy net frequency to pass this kind of lengthy traffic.  You may also have messages composed by your local Red Cross Shelter Manager or other Red Cross volunteers.  I will go into more depth on the "Safe and Well" messages in a later mass email.

When using Winlink have at least one thumb drive with you to allow the Red Cross to take the message to one of their computers and answer the message,  They would then return the finished message to you for sending.  With the ICS-213, the bottom half of the form is to be used for the reply.  Be sure that your reply contains the top half or the original message so that when the reply is sent, the receiving party will know what the reply is connected with.

Each of the participates will also receive simulated weather reports.  These may be sent via Winlink or via voice.  Carter, N3AO will be rotating through 3 SKYWARN repeaters.  These three SKYWARN  Repeaters will be the 146.745 in Roanoke as primary, 145.13 for the western area and 146.686 at Apple Orchard Mountain for the eastern area of the exercise.  Those in the far eastern part of the Commonwealth will need to send their weather traffic to N3AO@Winlink.org .  All the far eastern stations have Winlink so this should be no problem.  Other repeaters on our repeater list, will be used for tactical and resource traffic.

A VDEM planner and Amateur Radio Coordinator, Chris Bruce, K9CLB will also be composing typical message format messages to be sent to stations serving as EOC locations.  If you are acting as an EOC location watch for your messages from Chris.  During the SET you will need to send these messages back to the Virginia EOC RACES station at N4VEM.

We are continuing to look for an HF net control station so that we can have an 80 or 40 meter voice outlet.  If you are interested in serving as an HF net control, contact me at w4ghs@arrl.net or phone me at 276-398-3548.

Remember all messages need to contain "THIS IS A TEST, THIS IS A DRILL", all the messages that I have sent out have these at the top and bottom of the message.  These lines need to be read and the net control stations need to announce this from time to time.

Additional information is also posted at the Juan II website. http://www.w4ghs.org/juan.html

10/11/2013 we will have an HF net to support our efforts on or around 3.947 MHz and if we have band fading we may move to 7.243 MHz.  Al Keen,  N4ZZQ will serve as net control and will be located in Salem VA.  Get your HF rigs ready for the exercise.

More later,

Check back often for updates to this exercise!