ARES

Public service communications have been a traditional responsibility of the Amateur Radio Service since 1913. The Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES), organized by the ARRL, consists of licensed amateurs who have voluntarily registered their qualifications and equipment for communications duty in the public service when disaster strikes. The Amateur Radio Relay League (ARRL) represents Amateur Radio interests to regulatory bodies, provides technical advice and assistance to Amateur Radio enthusiasts and supports a number of educational programs throughout the country. ARRL is a non-profit organization and has a membership of approximately 156,000. CCEMS is supported from the North West Harris County Unit where there are approximately one fourth of the total Harris County members participating. The response team leader for CCEMS is KD2KW, Ken Mitchell.

The ARES response team for CCEMS maintains two emergency email stations (one HF and one VHF) using the Winlink 2000 System and a team of operators who provide emergency voice and email messaging communications should normal communications cease to operate during a desister or emergency events. The HF Winlink station, W0MAC, was the first Winlink 2000 Emergency Communications US station to begin operation in 2003. Currently, there are more than 15,000 Winlink 2000 radio users on all the classes of users and approximately 100,000 Internet recipients. Monthly traffic averages over 150,000 messages or 280,000 minutes. Each message has an average duration of approximately 3.4 minutes and each message averages approximately 3,200 bytes. The Winlink System consists of 5 mirror image, redundant COMMON MESSAGE SERVERS (CMS); located in San Diego (USA), Washington DC (USA), Wien (Austria), Halifax (Canada), and Perth (Australia). These ensure that the system will remain in operation should any chunk of the Internet become inoperative. Each Radio Message Server node (RMS) is tied together as would be the ends of a spoke on a wheel with the hub-bing being done by the Common Message Servers. Traffic goes in and out between the CMS and the Internet email recipient, and between the end users and the Radio Message Server gateways. Multiple Radio-to-Radio addresses may be mixed with radio-to-internet e-mail addresses, allowing complete flexibility. The Winlink System stations maintained by the ARES response members for CCEMS not only support local emergencies such as Katrina and Ike but also have been used to support emergencies in Hatti and International Health Services yearly trips to Honduras.