Submitted by VK2XNF on
Start time: 
Saturday, 9 January 2021 - 12:00pm to Sunday, 10 January 2021 - 12:00pm
Region: 
State

With bush fires and then Covid-19 we have missed all our usual field deployments for 2020. It looks like Covid-19 is here for at least the medium term so to help maintain our deployment readiness, and to have some fun, WICEN will run an exercise over the weekend of 9-10 January 2021. This exercise will be conducted in small groups (possibly as small as one) to minimise Covid-19 risks.

The exercise will have various parts depending on participants:

- Deploy a portable station in the field some distance from your home in a small group (1-4) maintaining Covid-19 safety by including strategies such as having separate operating points, maintaining social distancing, and using an operating roster.
- Practise wide area comms using HF or some other means back to Exercise Control
- Report on deployment planning and setup for the education of others
- Deploy Saturday morning - return home Sunday afternoon (possibly provision can be made for stations who only want to deploy for part of this period.)
- Practise SITREPs and other message passing
- Set up local nets using UHF/VHF and pass local messages
- Pass messages from local net to/from Exercise control
- Exercise control will generate drill messages and will also pass out some messages to participants prior to the exercise to be passed back to Base.

This exercise is also to encourage groups of members in regional areas to create a local net and link this back to Exercise Control.

More information will be promulgated closer to the event.

So we can gauge a likely number of participants, if you are interested in taking part that weekend please email wicen.training@vrarescue.org. Any suggestions or questions about the exercise are welcome at the same email address.

Once you have started to firm up your plans please provide the following information:

- planned location
- planned route from home to location
- likely contact to other nearby participants ie VHF / UHF simplex or repeater
- HF availability

The following amateur frequencies will be used;
Band Mode Freq (kHz) Comments
80m SSB 3615 * +/- allowing for other traffic / QRM
80m Digital 3578 JS8Call
40m SSB 7150 * +/- allowing for other traffic / QRM
40m Digital 7078 JS8Call
2m FM Repeater 147.150 VK2RWC ( +600kHz/91.5Hz)
2m FM Simplex 147.500
70cm FM Simplex 438.750

Thanks to Mal VK2YVA for the suggestion and for agreeing to take on management of the exercise.