"William" wrote ...

And you've trained your volunteers to some standard?

Our "volunteers" are government employees who have this duty assigned to
them as part of their employment, and they are well trained in EM. All of
the angencies that support us have trained their volunteers via either RACES
or ARES in EM. Of course, that training varies from jurisdiction to
jurisdiction, but there is little we can do to enforce our standards on
them.

Does your military installation have a MARS base support team?

We do not use MARS for multiple reasons. All of our ops are civil
service
and FCC Licensed Hams. This gives us much greater latitude in the
equipment, modes, and frequencies available to us.

That's too bad. Military communications has a specialized function
for such purposes.


I agree that the specialized function it provides could have assisted us --
and we too a long look at that when we were planning. But in reviewing all
COAs, the cost-benefit just wasn't there. Since we are primarily in contact
with civilian agencies (both state and federal) during emergencies, it made
better sense to utilize the cilvilian HAM radio assets we had in place. We
have plenty of standard military comms available other than MARS HF. The
Amateur radio piece is for redundancy purposes -- not as a primary means of
communication. For example, all of our VHF is military and of course the
SAT and wireless is run on military net/satilites for security purposes.

Arnie -