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Introduction On Saturday the 27th of May the members of the East Leinster Amateur Radio Club (ELARC) conducted a Black Sky drill amongst the sunny Wicklow mountains. Some background to the drill. A Black Sky drill is a simulation of a major extended power outage. The power outage can be either man made, such as an electromagnetic pulse, a cyber-attack on the grid or a physical attack on the power distribution network. It can also be caused by a natural phenomenon such as a coronal mass ejection similar to the Carrington event of 1849 which wiped out large sections off the early Telegraph system in the United States. Causing Telegraph stations to burst into flames. Other causes can be winter ice storms, hurricanes, or other major weather events. These black sky events are typically very rare but have a very high impact to the electrical distribution grid. Training Goals This drill is a scripted, Directed Net with some specific training goals: Improve operator message handling skills. Be...

Today club members Tom EI5IEB and Frank EI8HIB concocted a successful test of being able to send and receive email over HF. Tom and Frank setup two portable field stations in the hills outside of Skerries, IO63vn  on Sunday morning. A schedule had been setup in advance with David EI3HIB  to test both the sending and receiving of email using Winlink over HF on 80m. This test formed part of a wider AREN (Amateur Radio Emergency Network) initiative to understand the practicalities of country wide email communication over HF in the event of a grid down and as a mechanism for radio armatures to aid the emergency services in passing messages. 80m was chosen as it lends itself to NVIS (Near Vertical Incidence Skywave) communication. The club noticed that every Sunday at 1200 local time the IRTS news is broadcast on 3.650Mhz from locations around the country. Call in's afterwards are received from both fixed and portable station country wide. From one of the club's primary portable ...