Many emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tions groups train for deploy­ment in an actu­al dis­as­ter to WITH Ama­teur Radio sup­port­ing emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tions for served agen­cies and the community.

With this in mind the Bel­gian ARES (B‑EARS) had a joint exer­cise with the Dutch Ama­teur Radio Emer­gency Ser­vice (DARES) called ‘pow­er outage’.

Held in 2016 those involved in the exer­cise gained valu­able expe­ri­ence, while show­ing their abil­i­ties to the authorities.

The sce­nario was: Both nuclear pow­er plants in Bel­gium are closed down due to a cool water leak. The Bel­gium gov­ern­ment ask the Nether­lands if they are able to give extra elec­tric­i­ty capac­i­ty. They agreed to help but it went wrong and most the south­ern part of the Nether­lands was blacked out.

B‑EARS need­ed to arrange emer­gency pow­er, water and med­ical sup­plies for the affect­ed Bel­gium and Dutch provinces, while DARES was also charged with pro­vid­ing an emer­gency com­mu­ni­ca­tion network.

They found that two Dutch provinces could com­mu­ni­cate via voice on 40 metres, but at the time con­di­tions were not good. Oth­ers could talk on VHF/UHF. All sta­tions had the abil­i­ty to work with Win­link. There were four posts in the Nether­lands and one in Belgium.

The con­clu­sion was that next time HF was used they would use with Pactor modems instead of rely­ing on SSB, espe­cial­ly for those sta­tions fur­ther than 300 kms away.

This report comes from DARES Region­al Coor­di­na­tor Jan PA7O. If there pre­pared­ness exer­cis­es in IARU Region 3, please feel free to share both the sce­nario and out­come for the inter­est of all.

– Jim Lin­ton VK3PC, Chair­man IARU Region 3 Dis­as­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Committee