East Leinster Amateur Radio Club have had a Plane Crash!
OK, it was only a pretend crash, but it was a great scenario for a training exercise. The East Leinster Amateur Radio Club has been out practicing again – remember our “Black Sky” event earlier this year! This time the project was a bit more adventurous. We got together with the Glen of Imaal Mountain Rescue Team (MR) and with Wicklow Civil Defence (CD) to run a combined operation to practice and hone our skills with simulated emergency communications. We also had a guest observer from the Wireless Communications Laboratory at the Tyndall Institute with us. The Glen team responded to an imaginary small aircraft crash in the Ow Valley (just south of Lug na Coille). This carefully chosen location near Aughavannagh had no mobile phone signal, no Tetra radio signal and was very definitely out of line-of-sight for VHF signals. The background to the exercise was to simulate the failure of the Tetra radio system operated by the emergency services, and to assess the feasibility of using HF