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

[Dale Sollars]

Thank you.   Dale

On Wed, Jun 22, 2022, 4:53 PM Shawn Donley <n3ae at comcast.net> wrote:

> 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 no
>  rmally.  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
>
>
>
>
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