Operation: Smoky and the Land Lit
(sounds like Smokey and the Bandit)
A fun exercise that will get you outdoors on a fabulous Saturday morning while using your radios in the public interest.
We need players! We will need a very good turn-out to make this exercise work well. All radio amateurs are encouraged to participate and those interested in Amateur Radio are welcome to join us. Let us know by Thursday evening, October 3rd that you want to play by sending us an email at exercise@pkarc.org. We need to fill positions in our mobile fire observer teams, at our Incident Communications Center in Easton, and at our Simulated Emergency Operations Center (EOC) at Saint John Hospital. The exercise, for most players, runs from 0800 hours until noon. The exercise briefing takes place at 0800 hours in Easton.
The prairie fire scenario for our Simulated Emergency Test (SET) is the third most likely perilous event for Leavenworth County behind severe weather events: Tornado and Flood.
Background. On previous exercises, we ran into communications issues when operating at or beyond adequate repeater coverage, especially in the rural areas close to the western Leavenworth County border. From our last SET after action reports, we, as communicators, need to be able to quickly and effectively create a communication footprint in austere areas and connect that area to Leavenworth-based facilities (Hospital, EOC, Dispatch, etc.)
Objective. We are going to “fill the gap” with traditional legacy capabilities. Legacy capabilities are VHF/UHF FM voice and Packet Radio. We’ve done some preliminary tests and were amazed at how well our portable repeater and digipeater work, extending the ability to use a hand-held radio and, at low power, talk clear back to the Simulated EOC in Leavenworth. This is a full-scale exercise and we hope to be able to prove our capabilities with a lot of participants.
Exercise Plan. The full EXPLAN is already available to those who have already indicated their desire to participate. It is available in the ARES file are in the PKARC Groups.io site. Normally, the EXPLAN is not released to the players but we want everyone that participates to know all the work that went into preparing this event.