Good morning patriot radio operators!

As you and your fellow T-REX participants prepare for a weekend of testing your comms and preps, there are a few helpful hints and tips to leave you with.

  1.  Keep a notepad for jotting down thoughts, observations, lessons learned, items to be replaced, purchased, or improved upon, questions you may have about practices and procedures, etc.  If you don’t, you WILL forget most of them.
  2. Unlike regular practice nets, nets during a simulated emergency training exercise mimics real-world operations.  Net Control will not emphasize taking lots of check ins and then passing traffic.  Moving traffic is the priority, and you will not normally check in unless NCS asks for check ins.  He will first ask if there is any Priority or higher traffic for the net, and handle the highest precedence first, in the order received, and then will work his way down to Routine.  Welfare traffic is considered Routine.
  3. TURN JS8CALL OFF (uncheck the ‘TX’ button in the upper right hand corner) during scheduled net times, even if you don’t see the net taking place, UNLESS Net Control specifically asks for JS8Call/COMMSTAT transmissions during his net.   Do not call for SNR requests during nets or when you can see traffic being passed at 900 on the waterfall, to avoid interference by your overpowering adjacent JS8Call signal.
  4. Commstat.  The Map Pin color should reflect the most degraded category in your STATREP.  If your power is completely out (Red), your map pin should reflect this.   If your map pin is Green while you have one or more categories in your STATREP set at Yellow or Red, that operator has done it incorrectly.  More training to follow after T-REX.
  5. Commstat STATREPs.  Be sure to only produce one STATREP per day.  Then, ‘Forward’ your own STATREP throughout the day using the STATREP ACK feature in the dropdown Menu, but not more than once per hour, or when changing bands/frequencies.  Produce and transmit a new STATREP that day only if a category in your STATREP has changed.
  6. JS8Call Heartbeats.  If you set your Heartbeats on a schedule, send a heartbeat NO MORE than once per hour, or when first coming up on the air or changing bands.
  7. STATREP ACK.  Watch for Commstat STATREPs.  If you see one that has not been acknowledged, then send an acknowledgment (“ACK”) using the STATREP ACK option in the dropdown Menu.  ANOTHER helpful practice is to Forward a STATREP, especially if you an “flyover country” in the center of the United States.  This helps populate the Commstat dashboard for others who may be too far away to directly copy the originating station — East Coast vs. West Coast, or far north vs. deep south.

ADDITIONAL COMMENT:  Your STATREP during the exercise should at least reflect commercial power, internet, and communications outages

Any real world outages or radio traffic should be accompanied by ‘REAL WORLD TFC’ tag or label.

Any other suggestions?  Add them in the comments below!

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