Two Thousand Seventeen

To All ECs adn DECs
Please Forward

As we plummet headlong into 2018, I thought it might be worthwhile to recollect what an amazing 2017 we had, and I am looking forward to an even more exciting 2018.

All our ARES members, and especially our ECs, did yeoman duty this year. We began the year with the news that our Section reported more volunteer hours than any section in the country. I don't know how it will turn out for 2017, but certainly there was a lot of reporting.

A few years back, FEMA asked us for a database on what capabilities we
had at public facilities, and our ECs updated that database this year. In addition, ECs reported how many folks they thought they could
muster in various circumstances and with specific skills. These
reporting tasks may seem mundane, but they are important to understand
so we can plan effectively.

I would like to ask each EC to take on another task immediately. Thank each of your members for their generous service. Those folks often come out for rather boring, but necessary duties. But each and every one is important, and each deserves recognition.

In March and April and again in June we had a number of severe weather events, including flooding in the U.P. and flooding in Central Michigan. In July and August we had additional, but localized, severe weather events.

Folks came out to support numerous walks, runs and other public service events, perhaps most notably the Labor Day Bridge Walk, where members from Luce to Antrim impressed the professionals with the kind of accountability APRS offers.

Besides actual activations, we participated in a large number of drills and exercises. As a Section, we participated in the "Statewide 2017" exercise as well as our annual SET. The SEOC crew additionally activated for three radiological exercises and the 100th anniversary special event station.

We had our first, in-state AUXCOMM class this year, and another planned for the end of January. We also had the first, amateur radio focused MI-CIMS training, and expect to have more in the coming year.

We had an amazing Division convention at MIS, which I hope we can repeat in coming years. Rick Roderick was an amazing speaker, and it was great to see so many folks that we don't get to see so often.

Your SEC followed a number of SEOC activations that ended up not requiring communications assistance, as well as three tabletop exercises.

The Auxcomm Working Group is finishing up the volunteer radio portion of the Michigan Emergency Communications Plan, and will shortly be turning to the Michigan Emergency Management Plan. In addition, we hope to update the rather stale "Michigan ARPSC Guidelines" in the coming year. Further, we will be providing input to the State Communications Interoperability Plan, so we are well entrenched in that state's communications planning. With all this planning in the works, the state is offering the assistance of their planners.

The FEMA Region V Auxcomm Committee has established a region wide frequency plan, and will be documenting activation procedures shortly. If you need assistance from outside the state, look to 60 meters channel 4, if busy, try 5, 1 2, 3 in that order. If conditions warrant, go to 40 meters, 7.180 and up. If Internet is available, look to REF024A on D-STAR (we hope to have a dedicated reflector before too long) or R5AUXCOMM on DMR. Of course, in most cases you will go to the SEOC first and they will make the out of state contact, but you should at least be aware of the frequencies.

So what will the new year bring? We have heard that changes will be coming to ARES, and we will hear more about that at Interop in February. From what we can tell so far, it looks as if those changes will be positive.

As mentioned, we have a number of plans to work on. We will essentially re-run our SET on April 28. We will be working with the state's Training and Exercise Section to include us more meaningfully into the state exercises.

We will be asking the ECs to provide us details of their primary repeater. We have had a questionnaire ready for some time, but we were hitting the ECs with one request after another, so felt it best to hold off. Meanwhile, KE8CRV will be providing us with MI-CIMS boards for that purpose, which should be a lot easier to use.

At the SEOC, we still need to get the Pactor station on the air. The packet station is up, but I hear not working properly, so that is something to investigate. We still need to identify and acquire a new tuner so we can get a power amp on the air. We also plan to have an intercom system so that the place won't be quite so noisy when there are multiple stations on the air, get additional Internet connections into the station, and perhaps move some of the positions a little so the VHF/UHF seats aren't so crowded.

We have some really good presentations planned for Interop. Looking forward to hearing from Mike Horn, Chuck Cribley, Dale Williams, Mike Corey, Ron Peterka and others. it promises to be a very ham-heavy conference.

We had some good success providing a training video on voice communications, and plan to prepare more videos in the future. We have been offered assistance from both the League as well as the state's Training and Exercise Section. We may well incorporate those videos into Mi-Train so that folks can track the videos along with other courses they have taken.

So a lot happened in 2017, and we expect a lot more to happen in 2018.  Again, thanks to all of you for your service and dedication. I may get to schmooze with the bureaucrats, but the folks in the field do all the heavy lifting. Thank you all so much.

73 and Happy New Year
de WB8RCR

2015 Overview

Sorry this is so long in coming.  But probably worthwhile to review 2015.

First, and most importantly, Michigan ARES members reported over 100,000 volunteer hours in 2015, with a volunteer value of almost $2MM.  Emergency Coordinators reported 202 planned incidents (walks, runs, etc.) and 119 unplanned.  Included in the unplanned were 41 SKYWARN activations, 28 Search and Rescue outings, 6 power outage and 5 fire responses.

Hours contributed in direct emergency response have fallen slowly over the past few years, but that has more than been made up for in drills, exercises and other preparedness work.

In terms of statewide exercises and preparedness, in 2015 we participated in the statewide tornado drill in April, the Northern Exposure exercise in June, an improvised nuclear device seminar also in June, a radiological awareness workshop in August, an exercise involving the alternate SEOC in September, the D.C. Cook nuclear plant series of exercises in September and October, and the annual Training and Exercise Planning Workshop (T&EPW) in November.

Last year our annual Simulated Emergency Test was built around a zombie apocalypse.  Participants made heavy use of NBEMS and some use of D-Star.  Counties sent their ICS-205 forms to the state reflecting the disruption to communications caused by a zombie outbreak, and were reminded of the importance of keeping their 217A up to date, and of the utility of the 201 and 202 when things go south.




In 2015 the SEC took the FEMA Auxcomm class, and co-authored an updated Amateur Radio Emergency Service manual.  The state's Interoperable Communications Board named the SEC and Marc Breckenridge, the EMC for Washtenaw County, as co-chairs of an Auxcomm working group.


One of the more fun bits as we headed toward the new year was wrapping up construction of a new state EOC.  The ARES/RACES station will feature a full size 160 meter loop for phone, G5RVs for CW and Pactor, and a 150 foot tower housing our VHF and UHF antennas.


All in all, a pretty good year last year.

Activating your Program

During the Spring Tabletop, it became clear that while many programs have plans for activating, many do not, and those that do have some significant shortcomings.  Although they were not targeted for the tabletop, I suspect that the nets are even less prepared to activate in the event of need than the individual counties.

In most counties, the EC sits on the county EOC, and as such, gets a page whenever the EOC is activated.  But most incidents don't rise to the level of requiring an EOC activation.  Many are handled by a single agency such as Red Cross, County Health or Salvation Army.  If those agencies need our assistance, in many places they don't know who to call.

The Red Cross in particular is somewhat problematic.  In recent years they have reduced the number of chapters dramatically, so chances are the chapter serving your county isn't in your county.  In fact, you might not even know who the players are.

Each EC should be reviewing those agencies that might service their jurisdiction and be reaching out to those agencies to help them understand what you can offer, what you cannot, and who to call if a need arises.

The other issue that shows up has to do with bench depth.  Your served agencies should not have just one phone number.  There should be multiple paths, phone, email, page, twitter, whatever, and multiple levels.  I would suggest at least three deep.  In some northern counties where many of the members head south for the winter, three might not be enough.

And it isn't sufficient to simply have the list of names.  They have to know what to do when they get the call.  Each EC should personally review what needs to be done with each assistant, and the plan should be written and available to all the members.  At least the EC, the AECs and the EOC station should have a paper copy of the plan.  Most of the time an online copy is adequate, but there should be a hard copy in the hands of critical players.  Each county has a slot on the ARES web site where they can place these plans, and if there is sensitive information in the plan it can be password protected.

It is important to keep it up to date, too.  Yes, chances are you will need to re-print the paper copies every few months.  But that is a small price to pay for being prepared.

This Internet/paper thing does get interesting.  Recently, Joi Ito posted a TED talk on "becoming a now-ist" (http://tinyurl.com/lwdcu24).  The interesting thing abut his talk was that many of his ideas revolved around the Internet.  The Internet opens up entirely new ways of innovating.  My work with Fedora has given me some insight into just how powerful these tools can be for those that are willing to learn them.

But we have these competing needs.  While we need to be very quick to respond to new and challenging situations, we also need to be able to operate in conditions where we do not have access to the Internet.  Unfortunately, that has caused many members to totally distrust the Internet and be unwilling to use it, even in places where it is appropriate.

These days everyone is very busy, and getting folks together to work on new things is difficult.  Internet tools, especially those that allow for asynchronous input, can be very helpful.  We all use email, which is one such tool.  For many things, the wiki can be a much more powerful tool.

Back in 2012 I created a wiki on github to collect thoughts on ARES and NTS, and there is currently a page collecting input on the 2014 SET.  There has been a lot of good input on SET, but unfortunately only from a few folks.  A wiki is a web page that people can edit.  You can, for example, throw up an outline of some proposed policy and get your members to provide their input.  You now can benefit from the input from all your members to develop the policy more fully before you commit it to paper.

I particularly like the wiki on gitorious.org and github.com for two primary reasons; first, since they are backed by git you can see the history of changes and undo any change, and second, they are crude.

Why do I like crude?

• Crude means easy to learn
• Crude means you won't waste time making it pretty, and that means
• You will focus more on content than cosmetics

I have a slight preference for gitorious because it is open source, which means that if gitorious goes away, we can load the wiki somewhere else.  Internet sites have an annoying habit of disappearing at inconvenient times.  In fact, gitorious even provides a link where you can download your entire wiki to your PC.

I would encourage each EC and Net Manager to

1. Set up an account on gitorious
2. Create a project
3. Create a wiki for the project
4. Add a page for something that needs to be worked on
5. Encourage your members to contribute

In fact, your activation plan might well be a good place to start.  (see this wiki  for an example of a starter wiki).