Join Your Local ARES, RACES, or MARS! We need your help before hurricane season.

Please Join your local Ares, Races, or Mars groups to help and seek help when SHTF

As we have seen time and again recently, iphones, celltowers, landlines, do not always just magically work. Especially as we go into 5G, there will be mass disruptions of access to emergency services and first responders. Satellite phones and data do not work during the worst of the storm. Hell, even first responders may have no means to communicate. When SHTF, as we saw in Puerto Rico, Houston, Panama City, Mexico Beach, the ONLY operable backup communications system is long / medium range ham radio. If your org does not have a backup comms plan, as seen in Puerto Rico, especially, you cannot coordinate multiple independent volunteer VOAD, NVOADS, NGOs, and government agencies at Fed, State, Local, and tribal levels, let alone across dissimilar military branch comms structures. There’s no other unifed comms device that lets community actually interact with national guard, coast guard life flights, civilian air patrol, hospitals, police, air force medevac and logistics, Navy floating hospitals, shelters, churches, EOCs, CERT, Brace, Red Cross, or local mayors, governors, fema, dhs, cbp, and others in an actual national emergency. There’s nothing. They are all on dissimilar frequencies with dissimilar encryption and security protocols. This is by design. BUT it imperils us when everything else fails. There must be some way to get ALL of these stakeholders to communicate easily, effectively, in an auditable ICS/NIMS compliant manner.

So what’s the best we got? At present, Amateur Radio Emergency Services volunteer VOADs … but these are old souls with dwindling numbers. We need new blood. We had previously only really used FCC certified ham radio operators, but we need to expand. We need to include, more generally, ANYONE from the community to help with and prepare for emergency comms. We could really use your help. Please consider joining Ares, Races, (or Mars if you are military). Towns and counties across America need your help – especially during winter blizzards and preparing for next hurricane season.

Even if you don’t have your FCC technician license, we can use you. Help your community? If you have any questions, please feel free to comment or email CatSignal.US@gmail.com below. In the meantime, if you don’t have your ham license, you can still use smaller, tactical comms units like FRS/GMRS/MURS/GoTenna/MotoT800 / Sonnet Mesh, even CB to help ARES coordinate disaster response and recovery and gateway / digipeter between ham and unlicensed bands /devices. Some of these, like Gotenna even have civtak, ATAK team assault/awareness kit, blue team tracking, or APRS-like functionality, digipeter, TNC, Kiss, @mobilinkd with HIPAA-level encryption, 1 to 1, groups, or public broadcast and reception receipt. Winlink still has its place, but for short comms hospital & shelter to EOC, Gotenna / talkabout moto t800 / sonnet mesh / beartooth / devices are not bad.