St. Mary's County, MD - ARES

Hams with a plan...

Month: August 2023

October Simulated Emergency Test (SET)

August 22, 2023 /

Preparations are underway for our participation in the October 2023 SET.

Our draft plan so far:

  • We will establish a Net on the 147.390 repeater when called to activate.
  • We will have three (3) teams deploy to locations within St Mary’s County to verify the location of designated Geodetic Markers
    • Team 1 – North end of the county (Charlotte Hall/Mechanicsville/Sotterly)
    • Team 2 – Central area of the county (Leonardtown/Hollywood/California)
    • Team 3 – South end of the county (Lexington Park/Ridge/Point Lookout)
  • Each Team will have an APRS equipped vehicle beaconing their location as they deploy
  • Upon locating each marker, each team will compose and send to Net Control a ARRL Radiogram via voice stating verification & condition of marker
  • Net Control will gather all the reports and generate an ICS-213 (General Message) form in WINLINK Express summarizing the status of all markers
  • Net Control will transmit via WINLINK (ARDOP on HF) to a relay station in Charles County who will forward on to the Section Emergency Coordinator

We still need to identify the specific markers to be going after and we need to do some experimenting with a relay station in Charles County, but I think this is a solid plan and exercises all the techniques we have been practicing.

Fox Hunt @ Newtowne Neck Park

August 20, 2023 /

            A huge thank you to all that were able to make it out to Newtowne Neck Park yesterday! We learned a thing or two about how far a 15 milliwatt 2m FM Transmitter will really go! After hiding the ‘Fox’ down one of the trails a little ways, the group set out to find it with a variety of HT’s and antenna combinations. At the end of the day the homemade Styrofoam box that Jim {KB1YZ} made was the winner in locating the ‘Fox’! Congratulations Jim and great job on coming up with the most unique setup!

            I setup the KM4ACK End-Fed Half-Wave antenna we are going to be doing as a workshop to show how it deploys and works and Chris W4NRG setup his Wolf-River Coil and activated the park (twice actually – once on 20m and then again on 40m).

            I know there were some who were disappointed in not being able to attend this past Saturday, but fear not! We’ll look at doing more of these type of events in the near future!

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