[HiDARG-MEMBERS] Cascadia Wrapup - SCHS Support

[John Bruce]

Thanks Ray!
I enjoyed my day helping to man the station at Redmond SCHS. I learned a great deal and four of us from Redmond are meeting again on Tuesday evening to improve the station layout and improve our skills with Winlink over the Internet.

Again, thank you for giving us the opportunity to become more acquainted with HIDARG.

Sent from my iPhone
Working together to improve the way we think and act. 

> On Jun 10, 2016, at 9:28 AM, Ray KG7AV <kg7av at bunkai.net> wrote:
> 
> Thanks to all of the folks who         turned out to assist with ARES and the St. Charles Healthcare System yesterday as part of the northwest Cascadia Rising Exercise.  I'll let Andy cover the ARES wrapup, and summarize the SCHS portion below.
> 
> I spent the day in the SCHS EOC, and am grateful to our folks who manned the KF7IKX and KF7IKY stations. There is a natural 'dynamic tension' in these exercises between focusing on learning how to assemble and operate as an ICS team, and the role playing / injecting of realism scenarios.  Early in the day, it became clear that the SCHS folks would rightly focus their energies on learning how to 'do' ICS.  While that reduced the amount of traffic that our folks were required to handle, it did not eliminate it altogether, and there were a handful of injections and sitreps throughout the day.  I appreciate the patience of our operators, who at times, I'm sure, must have felt like the Maytag repairman.
> 
> Being in the unified EOC offered us the opportunity to make radio and continuity of comms a visible and valuable resource at the executive level.  In order to facilitate the learning component, there was a lot of reliance on cell phones and internal email between sites in the morning.  There was an opportunity in the afternoon to walk through scenarios in which those resources simply would not be available.  Brian and Jeff helped setup the KF7IKX Kenwood to crossband between the Grizzly repeater and the tactical UHF frequency we were using for communication between the hangar and the EOC in the second floor boardroom.  I was able to hand my HT to the SCHS unified incident commander and put him in direct voice contact with his counterpart in Crook County at N7CCO.  The SCHS executive team assembled clearly saw the implications and value in having radio as a core component in the communications planning.  It was one of those great moments.
> 
> During the follow-up briefing with Ken Quiner, we touched on several opportunities for which the club can be valuable support resource:
> 
> Addition of standalone BPQ32 messaging systems at hospital sites, using the BPQ32 POP/SMTP capability to provide a bridge between RF data path links and the enterprise email system.
> Exploring HamWAN technologies to provide higher bandwidth IP based connectivity between sites.
> Ken is actively working with IT to punch down the network ports at the radio sites into the SCHS-Auth (vendor) network.  This will open up telnet and TeamViewer ports.
> Future deployment of a repeater(s) and coordination of voice and data frequencies for SCHS voice and data coverage. Grizzly Mtn provides coverage of SCHS sites in the tri-county area.
> The SCHS footprint is unique in that it spans multiple counties, and therefore multiple ARES and supporting clubs - HIDARG, the Grizzly Repeater Assn, and Deschutes and Crook County ARES. Yesterday, Bend and Redmond had operator coverage, and Prineville and Madras hospitals did not.  One opportunity for the club is to look at process improvements in communication between HIDARG and our compadres in Crook and           Jefferson counties to help ensure operator coverage at all SCHS sites.  We also discussed licensing classes so that SCHS might benefit from local employees with a 'secondary MOS' to cover radio ops.
> Thanks again to all who helped out.
> 
> Now on to Field Day!
> -- 
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> Ray Spreier                2016 President  
> KG7AV                      High Desert Amateur Radio Group
> qrm at kg7av.us               hidarg-pres at hidarg.org
> www.qrz.com/db/kg7av       www.hidarg.org
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