Well at least the government is looking at real life examples of things that could change life as we know it. The US Military is conducting an exercise with members of the Amateur Radio Community to help us understand what we need to do before a CME or EMP event to protect our communications capabilities to help with what I would assume would be nation wide comms in a Post event world.
Below is a Article from the ARRL(Amateur Radio Relay League), the defacto “management arm” of the FCC when it come to amateur radio or Ham Radio.
After reading this article, let me know if you will take part and what are you plans for such events.
Begin Article from ARRL:
A disastrous coronal mass ejection (CME) will be the focus of a national Military Auxiliary Radio System (MARS) communication exercise in early November, and MARS is hoping to collaborate with Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES) and Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES) groups. The MARS exercise will get under way on November 8 and continue into November 10. It will be a quarterly contingency HF exercise in support of the US Department of Defense.
“The exercise scenario will simulate a CME event and focus on actions that radio operators should take prior to and following a CME event,” explained Army MARS Program Manager Paul English, WD8DBY. “One thing we want to continue to work on is the interface with the greater Amateur Radio community.”
Read more on ARRL here
AD1 — I would be interested in hearing more about this event if you participate. You could post to Survival Monkey as I am a member there. Thanks for sharing the resource!!
I sure will. I have an email into them and I await a reply.
Respectfully
AD
Well the exercise came and went. i never got an answer to my request to take part. Today I got an email saying that due to logistics of setting up the exercise over 30 hams also did not get emails with details.
Here is the email from today from Paul English
mars.exercises@gmail.com
Fellow Amateur Radio Operators,
Thanks to everyone who was able to participate in the DOD-MARS-Amateur Radio Exercise from 8-10 Nov. We appreciate your support and efforts in helping to achieve the training objective of contacting as many of the 3,142 US counties during this exercise via radio only means. We are still compiling the results of how many counties were contacted.
I am now collecting After Action Report comments and recommendations for how to improve our processes of reaching out to the amateur radio community during these types of exercises.
I have already received a few comments and am interested to hear if there are other comments or recommendations, both good and bad, for how to improve this process.
Here are my thoughts on what I need to improve:
1. We need to better integrate MARS operators into their local ARES/RACES organizations locally, so they already know when and where your nets regularly meet and how to get ahold of you. We are also considering the need to plan for MARS operators to monitor specific RACES CPG 1-15 frequencies, the 5MHz interop channels, or maybe the HF-ALE channels, then announce monitoring windows and specific frequencies where we can be reached.
2. The way I structured the coordinating correspondence for the exercise was too cumbersome. This required an initial coordination email from me to you and copied a MARS Region Director who then had to appoint someone to contact you and then figure out when and where your regularly scheduled nets operate. I know in some cases, the follow on linkup didn’t occur due to a number of factors. The initial email should contain the information from #1 above to give you certainty from the outset of what the link up plan will be. For those that were not contacted, I apologize for my lack of a more succinct plan for how to do this coordination.
3. Because of the way I structured the coordination, I had to cut off coordination several days prior to Startex which left at least 30 amateur Radio Operators out of the exercise. I need to have a better coordination plan so there is no cutoff – so that if you are able to participate, just jump in and contribute.
Again, thanks for your interest in this exercise. My hope is that we can continue to improve this process and make coordination for these types of exercise more routine. I also want to consider scheduling a MARS exercise in conjunction with already established amateur radio exercises such as annual simulated emergency test exercise to give us more opportunities to train together in the future.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
v/r
Paul
did I read this correctly? Did this take place already? or will it take place this month, November 2017? when was the spreading like wildfire which is causing a huge distrust amongst the people against the government. I wish someone would take the Liberty of debunking these rumors if they are just rumors with no validity. if these exercises will have a negative impact on society, please let the people know what to do to protect themselves!