The Maryland-District of Columbia (MDC) Emergency Response Plan establishes guidelines and requirements for activation of MDC ARES® and NTS/NTSD resources, coordination with RACES operations in the MDC jurisdictions, and joint operations during local, regional, Section-wide, and multi-state emergencies.
The Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES®) and National Traffic System (NTS) are parts of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Field Services organization. ARES® provides emergency communications to the public and many served agencies. The NTS provides the Section-wide and nation-wide message handling manual net system and its parallel digital system, NTS Digital (NTSD). Both ARES® and the NTS/NTSD also utilize the global amateur radio Winlink 2000 (WL2K) radio-email system.
MDC NETS AND REGIONS
JURISDICTIONS
ERP ORGANIZATION
Communications nets in MDC are organized at several levels during emergencies:
1) LOCAL: ARES®/RACES nets operate within each of the county and city jurisdictions as needed to serve government and private relief agencies and to provide public welfare messaging services. These nets are managed by the local ARES® Emergency Coordinator (EC).
2) REGION: Three Regional Nets may be activated on wide-area 2 meter repeaters to provide jurisdiction intercom and, with liaisons, the means to move message traffic across the Section (the Western, Central and Eastern Regions shown in Fig. 1). These nets have liaisons from the jurisdictions, between each other, and with the MDC Section level nets. These nets are managed by the Section staff and manned by local jurisdiction amateurs.
3) SECTION: Section and Local NTS nets may be activated (listed under “NETS” in Fig. 1 and shown in following sections). These nets also run on a daily schedule as part of the NTS/NTSD. These nets are managed by the Section Traffic Manager (STM) daily and jointly by Section staff during emergencies.
During ERP activation these nets provide umbrella coverage for messaging between jurisdictions and Regions, with other Sections, with agencies inside and outside MDC, and with the national NTS/NTSD. They have liaison with the Region Nets, between each other, and directly from jurisdictions via Health and Welfare Local stations (HWLOCs). HWLOC stations in the jurisdictions provide separate welfare and agency messaging services to and from the Region nets, Section NTS nets and digital services which enables them to bypass other nets which might be busy with local or regional emergency related traffic. The Section NTS nets also provide messaging for Section administration and ARESMAT coordination.
Additional services are provided by stations at all levels connected for radio-email to the global Winlink 2000 (WL2K) system and for AirMail Direct Transfer messaging. Stations also connect with regular packet radio, repeaters accessed via Echolink, amateur TV, APRS and other modes as needed. All these stations may liaise with the local jurisdiction, Region and Section nets as required.
EMERGENCY NET OPERATIONS
ERP LIAISONS
WL2K – NTSD EMERGENCY NOTES
Figure 4: Winlink 2000 (WL2K) and NTSD Diagram
he global Winlink 2000 (WL2K) network is used by NTS/NTSD and ARES® for transporting radio-email formatted messaging including Batch-Files of NTS Radiograms. WL2K permits sending messages (with multiple addressees, copies, and binary attachments) to and from the public internet as well as to clients at [call sign]@winlink.org or [Tactical Address]@winlink.org (for Paclink clients only). WL2K is a radio-email forwarding system, not a BBS system.
During emergencies stations deployed into the field may access WL2K with packet radio via local Telpac Gateway stations. To increase resilience during loss of infrastructure (telephone lines, data links, ISPs, etc.) radio backbone switches and/or digi-peaters may provide paths from clients in the “last mile” to functioning Telpacs or PMBOs elsewhere. HF PacTor (with AirMail) may also be used to reach outside of the “last mile” to PMBOs when VHF/UHF links are not available. Local ARES® PMBOs can sustain radio-email service between all radio connected clients without any need for a connection to the internet. AirMail clients can exchange radio-email directly between stations by radio.
Shelter clients can submit Batch-Files of Welfare messages directly to the NTS/NTSD via WL2K thus relieving the need for intermediate manual handling. Victims may also email home and get replies.
Officials linked to local WL2K client stations can send and receive radio-email over amateur radio from their own computers or networks – a major advance in amateur radio relevance in today’s information-technology world. Deploying WL2K clients throughout the Section permits the exchange of radio-email between all ARES®/NTS and served agency clients thus ensuring total agency interoperability. (See the tutorial on basic WL2K topics on the SM home page, General Information section.)
DAILY NTS NET OPERATIONS
Figure 5: MDC Daily NTS Net Structure
See the links to the MDC NTS Net information and individual net pages on the SM home page.
MDC SECTION WEB SITE 