Have gotten some e-mails about a Simulation exercise between the American Red Cross and ARRL via ARES. It appears the exercise is two-fold local/regional and national. The scenario is described as a hacking incident that is only partially contained and then spreads to knock out grid power, cell, and internet connectivity. What they want is to have local ARES groups pretend to go to a shelter and set up shop on auxiliary power (with battery and solar preferred). The objective is to send Winlink and voice messages to a Divisional Clearinghouse who then forwards summary requests to ARC HQ.

I can see this being an outgrowth of the problems in PR. The ARC (and pretty much everybody else) woefully underestimated the impact of no grid power and no comms would have on their operations. Hopefully they will learn enough during this exercise to not repeat the mistakes of 2017.

One of the elements of the drill is to have a fictitious shelter sending status data to the regional clearinghouse. Maybe we should have a fictitious shelter for Arfcom. We could call it "Arfcom Potempkin Shelter #87". Maybe we could combine it with an Arfcom net of some sort and we use the number of check-ins as the shelter occupancy.

For better or worse (I think worse) all the government and NGO users seem completely fixated on Winlink, which almost no one actually uses otherwise it seems.

True that. But, everybody wants to send an e-mail and if RF is the only hammer you have, e-mail is the nail. I guess in theory if you're sending an e-mail to a point higher up in the C2 hierarchy, it doesn't matter whether it goes by Winlink or the internet. Whichever one is working at the time. I think maybe it's that some people don't like to talk and/or the likelihood of errors is reduced when using lossless transmission methods.

I've heard there is a large cohort of Carribean boaters that use it on ham freq's for commercial and business purposes (i.e. running their lives).

I am participating as part of local ARES group, we have two shelter sites in our city and a Red Cross facility. For the exercise we have an EOC at the Red Cross (in the parking lot as we can't enter the facility to access our radio room.) At the civic center a simulated site is being activated and I'm activating one at the high school.

We will all be on emergency power. It is a VHF/UHF exercise, any HF use is up to each team. In the morning there is a net on the ARES repeater, then a net on a HEARS repeater, a finishing with simplex net. After lunch we send practice messages using provided Red Cross forms over packet Winlink.

We will likely also locally communicate on 10 and 80m and use both HF and packet for Winlink. Unless it raining and I'll either just do it from the cab of the truck and not mess with HF or putting up a 35' mast for the V/U antenna. Most participants are working from home, I'm not sure how many are actually going to the field.

I signed up as an individual, however we have an active local ARES group I'll be with.
From what I gather, Winlink is OK until you get to sending the required (ICS) forms.
Time yourself with an hourglass or take positions on the sun folks.
Maybe not quite that much suck, but close.
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Edit: I'll be working from home. I currently do NOT have digi capibilities, so I dont know what I'll be doing.
Being the ground zero for the Sandy storm, were pretty active here.

Are you guys going to use HF or packet? I never have issues with Winlink and a 2m RMS gateway that is a few miles away.  

Not sure why they are focusing on packet, if the cell towers are down the RMS gateway in some dudes attic can't get on the internet so....

it is even worse than you think

The winlink messages will be peer to peer over VHF. The point? I have no idea

Was p2p VHF used a lot in PR for sitrep out in the communities? That was my understanding anyway. And it's bound to be faster than using voice to convey the same info. Those forms suck.

Not that I'm aware of. PR has a lot of mountainous terrain making VHF/UHF problematic. The public safety repeaters had been on the tops of some of the higher peaks before the hurricane but coverage was still not great. It took the FEMA folks almost a month to get to one of the repeaters in the El Junque forest. They ended up having Army folks airdrop in to fix it.

Most of the Red Cross traffic in PR was on 40m.

local group participating, I'm not involved... p2p via VHF is pretty sweet, but that's another topic for another thread

The new VARA mode is substantially faster on HF Winlink
Still not as fast as VHF, but better.

It's bizarre.

Interesting,  The local club near me has an annual VHF-simplex voice contest that's usually in March but was delayed until May 30th due to Covid.  I planned to do that as a rover station, and I might still over this.

I like the idea of email over RF but i find the limitations (due to amateur radio rules) frustrating.  What's the point if you can't use it for (at least) personal business?  Why do we have this ridiculous low data rate limit?

I'd imagine it's attractive for some of the same reasons.  One being you don't have to babysit it.  Type an email and click the send button and then walk away while the computer finds a connection and then transmits the info.






But....  why?  Sailmail is not expensive, as far as i know.  And if you're already on a boat there's little barrier to using MARINE HF freqs, correct?

Sailmail costs money. Winlink is free. If you are boat bum living hand to mouth and paying for boat repairs you would be motivated to cheap out.

Also, the point of Winlink is three-fold:

1. It is guaranteed lossless.
2. It supports formal a formal messaging structure.
3. It give direct access to and from non-amateur radio entities.

The price you pay is the glacial speed of the protocol, and the relatively high link margin required to make it work at all. Everything is a trade-off.

Have fun today everyone. I'll post pictures of our "shelter" (high school parking lot) once we've activated it.

All I did was check in to the state 80m Red Cross HF net at 100 w simulating battery power ( not using an amp , battery was sitting next to me but I was too lazy to hook it up) , but the propagation was so good it was amazing.

We had two HF stations and a 2m/70cm station, all three could do digital. The VU antenna was a 1/4 wave ground plane / 80cm j pole and the HF antenna was an 80 efhw setup as an inverted v.

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I really wish I could get the rotated ipotatoe pictures figured out. I can't figure out how to fix it on my phone. I rotate them and they come out the same. Oh well...