The purpose of this message is to ask for people's experience and thoughts about which modes and methods of digital to use for specific EMCOMM scenarios.
I'm in Fairfield County CT. Relatively small in size, relatively dense in population. Hilly enough that VHF coverage in the northern half of the county is spotty (even with the fixed repeaters currently in place) and in general VHF is limited to about 20 miles radius throughout the county even with a good base station and a reasonably tall antenna. We are told that the most likely scenario is that hams would be deployed to shelters or other fixed locations where our primary responsibility will be passing message traffic -- either formal NTS traffic or long list traffic such as shelter logistics lists, shelter occupancy lists, etc. My question is what modes/methods/protocols to focus on when planning for that kind of usage. Some of the scenarios we are considering are: 1. Long List shelter messages sent radio-to-radio direct on VHF FM (possibly via a repeater). In this scenario, Winlink is not available. We've been experimenting with WinPack and it seems reasonably reliable over short distances. However, it is somewhat slow, and it's not clear to me if it does error checking or not. We've noticed some quirks where the receiving station has to keep hitting enter to get the entire message (it receives two or three lines at a time between hitting the enter key). Is there other software or are there other modes of operation that people would recommend for this purpose? 2. Long List shelter messages sent via WinLink. WinLink via radio is grass-growing slow, but seems to be the major focus of most EMCOMM email planning. We can understand using it to reach internet email if there is no internet service available in the disaster area. What about within the disaster area if we have choice between radio-to-radio direct (e.g., via WinPack) or going via WinLink. Which would you consider the more desirable approach, or is there some other approach you would recommend? 3. Formatted NTS messages. Sending NTS messages by voice is certainly doable, but the idea of sending hundreds of such messages by voice doesn't sound like an efficient method of communications (although it's there if nothing else is available). There are any number of programs and macros that produce formatted NTS text output, so what are people doing in terms of sending such messages digitally? Again, send them via WinLink if available? Send them via WinPack? Send them via something else? If anyone wants to respond to me off the group, you can select my name and email address (instead of the group) when you reply to this message. Thanks. Jon KB1QBZ message cross-posted on PacLinkMP group.
