[CALV-AUXCOMM] Summary of June 22 Exercise at Huntingtown High School

[Shawn Donley]

Recording results for the record and future reference.

Participants were per our 2022 Hurricane staffing plan  (thanks Dale and Andy !)

Andy, KC3WRX
Dale, KC3RKP
Shawn, N3AE

The Exercise:  County's first practice exercise this year for a radiological evacuation/decontamination/sheltering after an accident at the Calvert Cliff nuclear power plant.  Another dry run is planned on 12 July and formal exercise on 13 Sep.  Calvert AUXCOMM services where not part of the exercise plan today but we took advantage of the opportunity to set up and check communications paths from the high school, which serves as the County's main shelter.

1.  Set up on south side of HHS using a 2M copper pipe j-pole on a 6 ft mast fed with 50 ft of RG-8U.  Main radio was a Yaesu FTM-200.  Power was a 20AH LiFePO4 battery.  In the photo below, X marks the antenna spot.  We located our table and radio outside just under the overhang above the entrance door since the weather was nice.  In a real event, we would be just inside the door or in the stairwell just to the right, which has another exit door. This area is at the end of corridor C in the high school.  The X location was chosen to be out of the way of exercise traffic with an unblocked path towards the south and the EOC. Another advantage to "X" is availability of emergency backup power using one of the red power outlets in the tech classroom across the hallway.

The red The O location, which we have used in the past for hurricane/tropical storm activation, will have potentially contaminated personnel traffic if the weather is inclement during a real radiological event,  so we did not set up there.  Plus the O location has more building blockage to the south.




2.  Could hit the 146.985 repeater solid full quieting on low power.

3. On 146.580 simplex, could communicate to a person using a 2M HT (on low power) through the building including at the front entrance.   This may become important as mentioned later.

4.  Checked simplex communications with the EOC on 146.580.  Using the EOC's remote stations on the Barstow tower, simplex comm was solid full quieting.   Using station PF3 at the EOC, simplex on 146.580 was OK but with noise.  Difficult copy on low power.  Both the PF3 and PF4 stations at the EOC, which use antennas on the EOC roof, are very noisy even on an open channel.  The antennas are quite close to other antennas on the roof.  Should try adding bandpass filters in the feedlines from the antennas to see if there's an improvement.  We still have a pair of DCI bandpass filters which are eventually destined for the backup EOC in Barstow.  But the noise could be coming from other sources which need to be tracked down.

5.  After the exercise, while back at the EOC, the exercise planners expressed concerns about having us so far away from the "action" and local command staff.  We had also expressed a similar concern pre-exercise.   Since we were able to demonstrate good HT communications from the building entrance to the radio/antenna location, in the future we may want to have one AUXCOMM member at their command location and another at the main radio location, or just crossband the main radio.  But for digital traffic, we'll need someone at the main radio using a laptop.  Spare batteries and a charger for HT's is a must.

6. After the exercise and while still at the EOC, several Winlink Packet messages were successfully sent into the KB2SKP-12 gateway in Hollywood, MD using both PF2 (Barstow tower) and PF3 (Courthouse antenna) at low power on the Kenwood TM-V71A's.  Connection speeds were 1598 bytes/min and 539 bytes/min respectively, the slower PF3 connection likely affected by the noise mentioned earlier.

7.  Not exercise related, but radio PF2 would not come alive initially.  PF2, like PF3, both use dedicated separate runs of CAT6 to connect their respective RemoteRig terminals (RF decks are in the EOC equipment room).   This was a surprise since the more complicated PF1 and PF4 radios, connected to the RF decks in Barstow using the county LAN, have never failed to come up since they were powered on in Nov 2021.  After some power cycling to PF2 and PF3 along with some wiggling and re-plugging of Ethernet connections, communications was established between PF2's front panel RemoteRig and its RF deck.   A flashing green LED on the RemoteRig Ethernet jack confirms they are talking.  But PF2's radio front panel still remained blank (no display/no back-light) and no RX audio.  Strangely, even though PF2's front panel looked dead, PF2 could transmit, as confirmed by listening on another radio.  Turned off the power, swapped PF2 and PF3's front panels, and then BOTH radios worked normally.  Swapped them back to their original positionss and they continued to work normally.  More troubleshooting needed but it looks like an intermittent connection, possibly the cable from the RemoteRig to the PF2 radio front panel.  As I left them, both PF2 and PF3 were working, but before leaving I tuned off their respective power supplies and the AC power strip in the equipment room.

N3AE
Calvert EC