Placentia Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service
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The Orange County Citizens Corps Preparedness Exercise took place June 8, 2019, at Saddleback Junior College. This one day class offered learning activities in the following areas:
STAGE TWO:
This next stage better allows you to maintain communications over a longer period of time and improve your effective communication distance. All these items increase your ability to get power to your HT radio for an extended time and some items improve your operation distance.
• Buy a second HT battery (highly recommended).
• Buy a battery for your cell phone with a USB charge cable to connect the battery to your cell phone. This will extend the time your cell phone will be operational. (recommended)
• Buy a HT battery drop in charger (mildly recommended). This allows you a more easy way to charge your battery because you only need to drop in the battery into it. Some drop in chargers will charge with the whole HT put into the charger while other chargers require that you remove the battery from your HT and slip it into the charger. What is nice is these chargers typically show you when the battery is fully charged or not.
• Buy a better HT antenna if e-ham reports that your radio supplies a deficient stock antenna. (Recommendation depends upon what e-ham says your antenna performance).
• Buy a cigarette lighter power cable so you can operate from an automobile (mildly recommended).
• Make or buy an Anderson Power Pole power cable so you can charge the battery and/or operate it from the power source (mildly recommended).
• Buy a battery shell for your HT radio (mildly recommended). These are exact size battery cases for your HT but you need to put AA or AAA batteries into them. The idea is that if an emergency event goes on for a really long time, the city will go out and buy the batteries for these cases.
• Buy a mag mount car antenna and an antenna for it (mildly recommended). Quite a few of the new cars do NOT recommend that you transmit from inside their vehicle. Your radio could interfere with the internal car computer. A magnetic mount antenna for the roof of your car will put the radio waves out side your vehicle. You will need to also buy an antenna for this mag mount. Make sure the antenna frequencies match the frequencies of your HT. This antenna should really improve your HT operation range because the antenna typically is so much better than the HT stock rubber duck antenna. Also, the automobile metal body offers a terrific ground plane that most often improves the radio performance.
STAGE ONE:
This is the basic or beginner stage. It gives you a fantastic basic package that makes you an effective communicator for the life of your single HT battery. The simplex range of most HT radios is typically at least one mile depending upon terrain but can extend beyond that distance some times. This radio is capable of using repeaters which can vastly extend the geographical coverage area for you. (Placentia does not have city repeaters. We have the option to use the county repeaters.)
Equipment:
• Hand held radio also called the HT (handy talky). We strongly recommend that you buy a HT that puts out at least 5 watts of transmitting power. To allow you to function as a Placentia RACES member you will need at least a dual band radio that covers the 2 meter and the 440 MHz bands. Your first radio should be a dual band radio..
◦ Comes with a single battery.
◦ Charging cable is always included.
◦ Stock antenna comes with the HT. (some HT radios supply inferior stock antennas)
◦ Instructions.
• Cost:
• If you already have a FRS radio, program it so that channel 3 with PL tone 3 is the primary channel. If you do not have an FRS radio, consider buying one. Channel 3, PL tone 3 is the exact frequency that Placentia CERT groups are expected to use. Your job is to monitor this frequency. If any CERT group needs to contact city hall their FRS radio might not make the distance. This is why the RACES operator needs to step in and make that distance using their amateur radio.