[GCARC] Support Of ARMY MARS Exercise June 4th. Final Plans

Wed Jun 3 14:32:32 EDT 2015

From:   Tom Gorman [tom.gorman2178 at gmail.com]

Sent:    June 03, 2015 14:15

Subject: Support Of ARMY MARS Exercise June 4th. Final Plans

Hello Everyone, 

Camden County EOC Radio Room will be hosting the Deputy State RACES Officer
Dennis Dura this Thursday Night at 1900 hours to  allow him to utilize our
radio station to conduct a statewide net. The purpose of this net is to
support ARMY MARS for a cross communications exercise across the CONUS.   

NJ State RACES will call a statewide net on 220 NJ2EM Repeater to request
all county EOC's to check in. Then he will switch to HF and take any
contacts on 80 meters from each of the Counties. Tom Gorman has requested me
to pass along this email.

Anyone interested in assisting from your home station on 80 meters is
invited. Additional information is listed below. Thanks in advance.

Rick N2PHI

From: Dennis Dura <k2dcd.dura at gmail.com

All,

Thank you for your responses to support this exercise. I've had some good
conversations with some of you on how to conduct this expedient operation on
Thursday. The following is how we will conduct the event and parameters for
operations.

1. Two bands will be utilized: At 1900h, the first Net will be called on the
NJ2EM 224.32 repeater for Stations that can make that connection. Following
the completion of that call - up, we will move to the typical range of the
State RACES frequency of 3.993.0MHz plus or minus LSB QRM/other QSOs. You
can begin listening in that range at 1900, as we will have a second operator
participating.

2. These communications will originate from the Camden County EOC, so
propagation on HF may be different than normal from West Trenton.

3. While we will be utilizing the call sign of NJ2EM, there is no
restriction for non-RACES stations to participate, as the objective is to
establish contact with at least one station, no matter the affiliation, or
any affiliation in every county.

4. Considering No. 3, you can forward these instructions to any operator on
your staff, or other amateur radio operators in your county that can help
achieve the objectives.

5. The contact information to be exchanged during each Net will be Call
Sign, Name, Town, and County.

I will be forwarding this message to some northern NJ Counties RACES
contacts that have been identified in case they too can participate. At this
time, ARMY MARS has established other means to establish contact with all
NNJ Counties, but this will also be offered as a backup.

Thank you all for supporting this effort. I know Harvey Klein, on behalf of
ARMY MARS is most appreciative. I know a couple of you are just seeing this
information for the first time, as we didn't have the proper contact in all
cases initially. 

Dennis

K2DCD

On May 31, 2015, at 5:02 PM, Dennis Dura <k2dcd.dura at gmail.com wrote: 

Gentlemen,

Acknowledging that this does not provide much notice to prepare, I hope that
we can conduct a Net to support ARMY MARS this week in their national
exercise. Harvey Klein, WS2Q/AAR2NQ/Morris County RACES, has been in contact
with me on this exercise and has been lining up various Nets to support the
exercise. The objective is to establish contact with an amateur radio
operator in each County across the Nation. He has been primarily working
with ARRL Sections to establish contacts. He has reached out to State RACES
to determine if we can hold a little notice Net on June 4th to cover your
nine Counties, and any others that join in.

When discussing this with a few of you, it was thought that our best
opportunity would be to hold a Net on the NJ2EM 224.32 Repeater at a time
convenient to you all on Thursday evening. If this is agreed to, we could
also advise the other County ROs in northern NJ, in case they could also
come up on the frequency so we can have as many redundancies in contacts as
possible. I would bring up the Net on the repeater.

Again, the objective is to only establish a contact for each County. This
information would then be relayed to a designated MARS Operator over radio.
An assumption of this exercise is that the Internet is down, so we cannot
use any modes that utilize that backbone.

If there is an easier way to accomplish this County by County contact,
please raise that possibility to this group. I am open to any possibility
that has a higher success rate. The contacts do not have to be RACES, nor do
I have to run the Net. If a Section wide ARES Net, on any other Nets can
provide this on Thursday, that is a fine solution...all that is required is
the contact information be relayed to ARMY MARS.

Harvey is copied on this messages, as are the relevant SNJ ARES Leadership
for their situational awareness and input.

When replying, please "reply all" so the Group can see the
commentary/thoughts.

Thank you very much everyone. 

Dennis 

K2DCD 

Assistant State RACES Officer

Message forwarded to the GCARC member for Tom Gorman, KE2ES by:

D. Jeffrey Garth

621 Greenbriar Drive

Williamstown, NJ 08094-1149

73, KC2WCS

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