TEMA Spring 2014 Exercise
The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) is sponsoring one of the country's premier events for communications training. The event brings together professionals and volunteers from across the state to work together for training and realistic exercises. Participants come from all sectors of radio communications: Amateur Radio, MARS and professional.

The only prerequisite to participation is an interest and a willingness to work as a team member. Participants learn new skills and get a chance to develop relationships with other volunteers and professionals. Licensees with little experience in emergency communications or who have not attended prior events are teamed up with more experienced operators for training and practice.

The exercise will be held at the Tennessee Fire and Codes Enforcement Academy in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, about an hour's drive south of Nashville. Activities begin at 1:00 PM Thursday, May 1 with command vehicle deployment having started at about 9:00 AM.

Entities participating will include a wide assortment of agencies, organizations and volunteers including TEMA personnel, National and/or State Guard, State Health, Vanderbilt LifeFlight, ARES, MARS, Winlink developers, Bridgestone Emergency Response Team (BERT), FedEx, Tennessee Baptist Disaster Relief, Red Cross, and others.

Exercise Scenario:
The premise of the exercise is that a major cyber-attack has been launched against the US taking down the Internet and critical infrastructures. Teams will practice sending and receiving simulated messages to coordinate the response.

The primary objective of the exercise is to practice sending and receiving Winlink messages that are relayed to their destination by radio forwarding without any use of the Internet.

Voice radio also will be used for inter-camp communication and coordination with other sites and off-site participants.

Formal and informal training will focus on a variety of topics including:
• Working in the field with drop kits, and command vehicles.
• Setting up HF antennas in the field.
• Using Winlink to send and receive e-mail messages via radio
• Use of Incident Command System (ICS) organization and procedures.
• Team organization and management


- Steve Waterman, K4CJX,
Winlink Development Team

What a great idea! I'd like to see a nationwide drill along the same idea.

Here is a link to the After Action Report (AAR) on the recent TEMA/ARES/MARS Winlink drill:

www.dtreg.com/TEMA_Exercise_Spring_2014_Winlink_AAR.pdf

(Keep in mind they have the advantage of key folks on the Winlink development team being from outside Nashville.)

Thanks to Michael N1EN for providing this.