Hams choose GMRS for CERT team. Instead of amateur radio, BeCERTAINN — Berkeley CERT & Inter Neighborhood Network will be using GMRS radios for their operations. “There are many licensed hams in Berkeley, but it proved very difficult to actually get a significant number of people involved in this effort,” Perlman added. “It was even more difficult to attract new hams, due to fears about the level of knowledge required to pass the licensing test.”
Practicing for disaster. Various agencies came together at the Civic Center on Saturday to deal with a mock disaster. The 24-hour mock disaster simulation was held during the annual Winter Field Day event. The theme of the day was public education and awareness, disaster preparedness, crime prevention and amateur radio.
“The goal of this event was to simulate a communication failure that required amateur radio operators to set up and maintain a communications system for 24 hours,” said Gary Young, Cove deputy fire chief and emergency management coordinator. “Many people are not aware of the steps to take during a disaster.” The event allows people to take part in the simulation, gain important information and become a part of the process.
There is nothing amateur about amateur radio. Tastefully restored Orange Train Depot Museum at 1210 West Green Avenue was a perfect setting on a perfectly sunny, chilly day to host the Orange Amateur Radio Club’s 70th anniversary Saturday and Sunday. Accompanying the sign advertising the club’s two day event, numerous radio antenna populated the depot grounds, making it possible for club members working their radios inside to reach far and wide in their search for contacts throughout the county, and well beyond.
Walter Underwood says
Our emergency volunteers (Palo Alto) use a comm plan which is pretty complicated, but seems to work.
Each neighborhood communicates with FRS/GMRS on assigned frequencies. Neighborhoods lines are drawn to match FRS/GMRS range.
The neighborhood net communicates with the main volunteer radio room (the Division Operations Center or DOC) with MURS (150 MHz). The MURS radios have external antennas.
CERT cache trailers are located at each fire station, and those define six CERT districts (this system is older than the neighborhood nets). Each CERT district has a 440 simplex frequency.
There are a couple of city-wide 2m simplex tactical frequencies. These are used for smaller, ham-only activations like parade support.
Coordinating five cities and Stanford, SPECS (https://www.specsnet.org) has a 2m repeater.
All the ham frequencies are used every Monday evening starting with checkins on the CERT frequencies, then a 30 minutes city net reporting checkins and giving announcements. City participation is reported to the main SPECSnet at 8 PM.
Neighborhood comms have quarterly drills. I helped with FRS/GMRS training on Saturday.
I did warn you that it was complicated.
Walter Underwood says
Monterey CERT took a different approach. They licensed three public safety frequencies and bought commercial radios. No need for licensing and they get good coverage.
http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/Communication-Tools-Make-Montereys-CERT-Self-Sufficient.html
Bill Leaming - N4GIX/WQWU626 says
I do hope all those ‘hams’ bought a genuine GMRS license ($70 for 10 years) from the FCC, otherwise they are operating illegally.