We held our first training exercise for message handling immediately following the regular monthly meeting for January. In keeping with our commitment to serve the community in times of an emergency, we decided that ongoing training in our message handling skills would be a valuable task. So we asked Ralph to organize today’s event and give some classroom training to the group as there were a couple of members who had never handled formal messages before.

There were 7 of us participating this afternoon. 4 were assigned a role as a radio operator at a reception centre. Jay took on the role as the operator at the EOC, Ralph functioned as net control, while Eric moved between people ensuring that any problems were addressed and provided help as needed. Each reception centre was to send 2 messages and receive 2, the EOC had 8 to handle. All stations were to monitor a 2m net frequency for instructions and to move to a UHF channel when instructed to pass traffic.

We had hoped to spread out in the ice arena but the noise level was so high that that location was not usable. So the participants moved into alternate locations. Bernhard ended up in his car, Deme in a chair outside the main entrance! Though it took somewhat longer than expected to complete, in the end all felt it was a worth while activity and had fun in the process. We felt that it would be worth while repeating the exercise later in the year.

Here are a few photos of the participants, click each image for a larger image.