Rejuvenating Interest
The past two weeks I've spent in Bethany Beach at the National Guard's 193rd Regional Training Institute in the Emergency Operations Communications Course. The course went over a variety of things from operation of a variety of radios, interoperability gateways, and the theory behind radio communications. This past Thursday we included a trip to the Smyrna Readiness Center which houses the Joint C4 Coordination Center as well as DEMA, which I'm all too familiar with. I was the only civilian in the course which was pretty neat as I got to learn a lot from the Army and Air Force personnel who were my classmates. The 193rd RTI is the US military's school for interoperability and I was lucky to get a spot in the class.
During the course, I got to play with a lot of radios that most civilians have never heard of including the following:
Harris AN/PRC-150 HF ALE Radio
Harris AN/PRC-117F VHF/UHF Radio
Thales AN/PRC-148 VHF/UHF Radio
ITT SINGCARS VHF Radio
Harris RF-350 HF ALE Radio
Motorola Micom-2E HF ALE Radio
Motorola Micom-3R HF ALE Radio
Motorola XTL-5000 and XTS-5000 Radios
In addition to learning the operation of each of these radios, we were given instruction on patching the various systems together using the Raytheon ACU-1000 and the various components available including the Wide Area Interoperability System (WAIS) and NXU radio extensions. It was great getting some hands on time with the ACU software and programming since we rarely use it within the state. We also got some time to learn about the Joint Incident Site Communications Capability (JISCC) packages that both the Army and Air National Guards are able to deploy during a disaster which includes a satilite mobile data terminal, VOIP phones, laptops, LMR's, repeater, an ACU-1000 with various public safety radios, HF radio, and video teleconference equipment all in one trailer. It is quite an impressive setup. The 193rd has a specific course just for the JISCC which I plan to take next summer.
Working with some of these guys on the military side, I really got to see some of the major issues we are going to run into during a disaster. First, I don't think the National Guard realizes how crucial these JISCC packages, and the other assorted commo equipment will be during an incident. These packages rely on little infrastructure compared to civilian systems and are versatile to where they can be placed.
I also really was able to learn a lot about the requirements that the Guard needs at an incident site when it comes to a detailed plan about where communications links need to be placed. They could really care less about how you want them to do it, they just need to know where the links need to be made and they will do it. I gave them some info about how they can fit in to the incident command structure and that their go-to person would be the COML of the incident. Also it helped when I provided them copies of the ICS-205 communications plan, which they were very unfamiliar with. The military has their own forms and format as we all know, but it helps when they become familiar with the civilian side.
We took part of a couple of commo exercises during the two weeks. One where we set up an HF base station at our location, programmed the frequencies and callsigns for ALE, and then required five manpack HF kits to deploy around the installation while they programmed their radios via the keypad. Trust me, it's not easy trying to program one of those things from the keypad, it's much easier just hooking it up to a computer and using the software.
The class helped to rejuvenate my interest in RF. Unfortunately my job at Delaware State Police takes me away from the RF side of things that I'm familiar with and I don't get to play commo stuff that much. This class refreshed my memory and gave me a few "I remember that!" experiences as we were going through some of the material. I can say it gave me an insight to how military commo works and how I'm going to have to interface with them during a disaster.

















