Saline  County  ARES

Saline County Arkansas

Updated June 16, 2018

Why Simplex?

Don’t get us wrong, repeaters are a great asset! However, Saline County ARES like all other ARES organizations, is here for Emergency Communications. What this means, in the simplest terms, is we need to be capable of continued operations in the worst of conditions. So, when the entire power grid is down in our area, there’s a good chance that the repeaters will start going quiet after an extended period of time when their back-up batteries fail. Which brings us to Simplex!

 After listening to the QSOs on many (if not all) of the repeaters, operators are frequently checking to ensure they have a good signal into the repeater. Now, when that repeater or linked repeater system goes quiet, will you be able to continue your transmissions of possibly critical life-saving information? 

 To ensure our equipment is “up to snuff”, Saline County ARES frequently holds “simplexercises”, which is where we shift over to a simplex frequency after starting one of our nets on the repeater. This allows us to check our equipment’s range with other operators in the area. So how does your equipment stack up?

If you participate in one of our “simplexercises” you’ll get signal/audio strength reports from operators around the county and some surrounding counties! Then you can determine if you need (or want) to optimize your set up, what can you do?

                Install a better antenna
                Increase the height of your antenna
                Replace your feed line with LMR400 for less loss
                Get more power

Many of the “Elmers” in our organization can answer your questions and quite possible help you come up with a more efficient solution. No matter if you’re on your base station on in your mobile, you may just want to know how it performs if the need arises.