St. Louis County ARES
Simulated Emergency Test
October 15, 2011

Report from Maryland Heights Fire House #1
2600 Schuetz Road

The ARES volunteers in attendance were -
Steve Wooten, KC0QMU
Gary Hoffman, KB0H

We operated from the conference room on the west side of the building. This
was conveniently close to the parking lot, where we set up our antennas,
running our coaxial cables through the conference room windows.

Steve was the exercise director, net control, and Maryland Heights station
operator. Gary served as backup, handled alternate frequency monitoring, 
and greeted guests.

We were visited by Jacob Reitinger, a Boy Scout working on a merit badge
for emergency preparedness, and his mother Julie. They were quite interested
in all things having to do with to emergency preparedness, especially as they 
related to the Boy Scouts. They also asked a lot of questions about amateur 
radio and radio in general.

Repeaters:
No one was able to reach the 145.210 repeater
Several stations had sporadic problems with the 146.850 repeater, so we
eventually moved to 146.910 as the primary.

Messages:
The SET was originally designed to be a much bigger exercise. Some messages
were deleted since only ten participants and four fire houses were involved.
This left a lot of "down time" between messages. The exercise director
decided to move things along and had stations call in their messages early.

Message handling:
There didn't seem to be any problem with message handling, though the
messages written down have not been audited. The only notable thing was that
some stations gave their replies right away rather than waiting the
prescribed amount of time.

Net operations:
Generally speaking, everyone seemed to have a good grasp of net coperations.
Everything went relatively smoothly. The only issues were -
1. Stations frequently failed to "recheck" or check back in when they
returned to the primary repeater.
2. Stations passing traffic on secondary repeaters stayed there and
waited for a reply. In a real situation it could be quite a while before
any response comes, so the stations should return to the main frequency 
immediately after passing their traffic.

Simplex:
Following the main exercise we ran a simplex test. West County was the
only station that had difficulty hearing or being heard. At Maryland
Heights we could just barely hear West County on our 20' antenna, but not
our 15' antenna. 

Gary
KB0H