Can’t you hear Gomer Pyle saying that? …if your old enough, that is.
Well, Well, Well, didn’t the gremlins give us a little surprise on the March 9th ARES training net? There we were about to get to the topic of the evening, “What To Do If The Repeater Fails”, and wouldn’t you know it right in the middle of announcements and updates as Ben KF5OEB was about to describe the next GCARC meeting topic he went silent in that special kind of way. You knew something was up if you thought about it… there was no squelch tone at the end of his last word. “Wonder what happened” you thought — did he lose power? Did the repeater drop out? Is it my rig? Did my lights blink? Wow, it’s sure quiet. Then slowly it dawns on you and you put all that together… no squelch tail, drop dead silence, your stuff is still on… Ahhh, the repeater failed! And now you try to remember what to do, or what the backup frequency is.
As some folks found, they didn’t have the right tone programmed, while some found they had no way to QSY to the 28 as it wasn’t set up in their radio’s programming, or some such similar situation. One op even had a “Homer moment” and thought about his mobile rig after the net was over. Some were unaware of the plan for backups. After the net, Paul K1PKZ suggested we try the calling frequency if the primary fails, and that is in the plan, but as the final-final backup. It was shared with him, and you should know that had this been an actual event and real situation “we” would have had someone monitoring all the backups we could to try and round everyone back up.
The plan is published on the ARES Training page of this website; look for the document called Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Now, we could review the plan and change alternates for valid reasons till the cows come home, but at the end of the day there has to be a plan and the folks who worked up the SOP said this would be the best. So, there we go with a plan. And, it worked as well as could be expected. As a result, some folks may change their radios by reprograming or consider alternative radios or HT’s, while others may read the plan and some of us will try to remember the plan. That is what Hams do — adapt to the situation.
You know on the net before this, Mike KF5NPM had a new battery issue; you can read about that here as well. His experience and this of ours last Sunday points out the reason we do these “silly” repetitive nets. Some people say nothing ever happens, it’s always some topic I don’t need to know about, etc., etc. But, things do happen to us and our equipment. This is exactly why we practice now while the weather is nice. We are safe in our homes and not out the elements, cold or hot, tired and frustrated with a radio that’s on the fritz because the batteries we brought are last year’s, a cable is loose or the antenna is gone from our car (yes, I hear it happens). We need to exercise ourselves and equipment to test our capabilities.
So, what really happened?
Well, that was a test of sorts also. David W5COP closed the repeater briefly to simulate an outage. He got it to turn off remotely I think, and more importantly turned back on.
And so, that’s what we want to do: be sure we can be on the air when we are needed. Check in next time…who knows? Something exciting might happen.
73
Rick
K5ECX