Radio Day is Coming!

A group of volunteers has been quietly putting together a plan to help Wallingford stay connected in the event of a natural disaster. Part of that plan involves purchasing and distributing ham radios to key points throughout the neighborhood to keep the different areas informed in the event of an infrastructure-crushing disaster.

“Radio Day” is coming! This Saturday, October 10^th, volunteer HAM operators will be in our neighborhood to test frequencies and strength needed to transmit effectively via portable radio between our proposed communication sites. Several locations have been proposed and the exercise leaders hope to have operators at all the locations by 10:00 (ten hundred hours for us lay persons). We are currently planning for the Good Shepherd Center/Meridian Park site to be the main communications hub with nodes at the other locations that would report “up” to Good Shepherd, who would then report to the City’s Emergency Operations Center in the event of an emergency where traditional communications are down.

We are hoping that community members that are interested in preparedness planning and specifically in staffing or using one of the locations in an emergency, will participate in the test and drill this Saturday. We have a grant from the Department of Neighborhoods to purchase equipment for each of the locations and funds for radio training and licenses for interested volunteers. This test will give us the information needed to develop the list of equipment needed to implement the communications network.

For more information about participating on Saturday or in the future, please contact [email protected]