It was decided at the leadership meeting that we will minimize our participation in the statewide exercise on Octtober 10. We will only activate and staff the County ECC for this exercise. The team will handle the Winlink traffic from the State ARES/OEM. The ECC team will be contacted by team leader Deb to staff this.
The exercise activities requested by the state ARES leadership involve field deployment, which we have done already fairly extensively this year. We feel it is too much to ask of you to devote three weekends in a row to ARES. It is more important and more valuable to your training and to the community that we put our effort into providing communications for the Portland Marathon the week before the exercise and the Disaster Relief Trials the week after.
The Portland Amateur Radio Club coordinates communications for the Marathon and Multnomah ARES coordinates communications for the Disaster Relief Trials. This is where we need to concentrate our efforts and our volunteer hours in October. Both of these events are fun to work and provide very different communications and radio experiences. We will be using interesting technologies for the DRT with APRS, EasyPal (Photos), HSMM (high-speed data), and field VHF Winlink.
Please sign up for one or both of these public service events. We need your help!