Mountain Simplex Results

Our first mountain top Simplex net was a great success along with the lessons learned. The idea of relocating our weekly Simplex net to a mountain top came up on our Simplex net and within two weeks, Kaleb’s Wish Foundation generously offered to make their Emergency Communications Trailer available for our use. The goal of this Simplex net was the bridge the gap between the Northern Shenandoah Valley and Northern Virginia using Simplex in case of a repeater outage. For this event, we choose Snickers Gap on Route 7 near Bluemont, Virginia as it provided easy trailer access and we believed would be fairly accessible in the event of a real activation.

In about 45 minutes, we had 33 check-ins on 146.580 MHz Simplex. Roughly three quarters of these check-ins were by relay all the way up into Western Pennsylvania. One of the lessons learned was the antenna mast at about 30 feet was receiving so much noise that we had to switch to a backup antenna that was about 12 feet off the ground. While this hurt our direct check-ins, it allowed us to still hold the net. With the noise at 30 feet, we were unable to hear anyone during pre-net setup testing.

Another lesson learned was the complexity of bridging the east and west sides of the mountain was harder than expected. A couple of ways we thought to alleviate this, include possibly using three nets: one East, one West, and a bridge net. This would allow for local traffic to remain on the local net and only traffic needing to pass between the to regions could pass on the bridge net. Another thought was to ask for check-ins from different regions at a time such as: Shenandoah Valley, Northern Virginia, West Virginia, other areas. This would slow down check ins and give more structure for relay check-ins.

Kaleb’s Wish Foundation also ran a GMRS Simplex net during the WINFRED ARES Simplex net. They were able to get 12 Simplex check-ins on GMRS. This also introduced additional complexity and added to the realism that having two nets operating so close to each other in the same trailer caused a good bit of noise that will need remediation in preparation for an actual activation.