ARES Simulated Emergency Test

I’ve been a member of the Colorado ARES Region 1 District 6 team covering Jefferson, Gilpin and Clear Creek counties since January. However, with the pandemic happening, basically all of our regular served events and in-person training have been cancelled. I think a few folks have deployed to help with incidents, but there hasn’t been much for newbies to do.

So I was thrilled yesterday to participate in my first ARES Simulated Emergency Test (SET) exercise. Our team activated all 3 county Emergency Operation Centers (Clear Creek EOC was virtual from someone’s house) as well as the City of Lakewood EOC! We had about 8 folks to staff those, and 15 folks out in the field sending pre-arranged “injects” or scenarios. One of the goals was to give the EOC staff practice at handling and aggregating traffic, and another goal was to test connectivity from our territory in various places.

I was one of the field operators, and my assignment was up in Rollinsville, CO on the Peak to Peak Highway. It was a beautiful day for a mountain drive; the fall colors were in full bloom, and the air was cool and crisp, a nice change from the wildfire smoke we’ve been experiencing. My location was in a bit of a canyon and the exercise planners were worried it would be a challenging location to transmit out on UHF. However, a DMR handheld with a mag-mount antenna performed flawlessly and was able to get out of the canyon to the repeater just fine. I also attempted a VHF packet radio connection for Winlink, but the RMS was behind several mountains and just couldn’t get out. I wasn’t too surprised. Maybe next year I’ll have my QRP HF station ready and enough experience to bounce a Winlink message out of the mountains.