Happy Memorial Day! No Net Tonight - ARES Trailer and Site Planning

Hello and Happy Memorial Day!  Since it is a holiday today and many people have other activities or are out of town, we will be skipping the weekly Net tonight.  

Also, thanks to Danielle Koerner, Deputy Chief, Special Operations at Delaware County Emergency Services, it looks like we may be getting a support trailer that we can use for a mobile operations center, located primarily at the 911 Center in Lima.

The plan is to setup and deploy the 3 original Go Kits (both the yellow and orange ones) furnished by the Southeastern Pennsylvania Counter-Terrorism Task Force.  This will give us a full set of frequencies that are available to us to operate on: HF, VHF/UHF using the Yaesu FT-857 and 1.2 GHz high speed digital data using the ICOM ID-1 DSTAR units.  The kits also have a Pactor modem, antenna tuner, notebook computer for digital modes, wireless router, DC portable printer and magnetic mount antennas.  We are in the process now of getting the radio programming updated, as well as getting newer laptops to replace the ones we have that are more than 10 years old, which will be capable of running Windows 10 and Winlink.

 This will give us the ability to quickly deploy to one of 3 locations and get up and running very quickly.  The locations will be:

• Radnor Township in the north
• Lima 911 Center in the middle of the county
• Delaware County Emergency Services Training Center in Sharon Hill near the PHL airport.

Since they will all have Pactor modems with a notebook, we'll also be able to run various digital modes, including Winlink.  The plan is to keep the stations on the air 24/7 as Winlink RMS nodes which will fully cover Delaware County and the surrounding areas.  I would also like to rotate having people check into the weekly nets using these locations in order to be more knowledgeable about the location and equipment there.

For the mobile trailer, I already have some items for the trailer, such as a desk and some storage solutions.  We have the Go Kits for there as well.  The only other thing we need for these locations are some high-gain base station type antennas, HF covering all bands, and a dual or tri band VHF/UHF.  We are meeting with Danielle to discuss these plans and the few items needed next week, so I would love to be able to have some written quotes to take.  

Since I am not an expert on HF antennas, I would like to ask everyone for some recommendations on what you think would be best.  We need to consider using both vertical HF and VHF/UHF antennas for the trailer so we can properly mount them and easily take them down/up as needed.  For the Radnor and Sharon Hill locations, we can consider using horizontal HF antennas for better performance and propagation.

Here are some antennas I've used that work well:

Please either reply to this email or send me an email at w3ctk@delcoares.net with your comments and/or suggestions.  Also, let me know if you have anything that you can lend or donate to equip the trailer as well.

EOC Trailer

Delaware County Emergency Services Training Center

Original Go Kits