The American Red Cross Mid-Fairfield County Chapter held a drill to familiarize DAT (Disaster Action Team) members with the territory serviced by the chapter; gain experience in the use of GPS to navigate to a destination; learn about the use of radio during a deployment; and compare the operation of VHF/UHF amateur radios and Red Cross 47.420 MHz radios.

The plan was to deploy five Red Cross vehicles to different destinations within the ten served communities covering over 200 square miles.  Each vehicle would deploy with a ham operator carrying a handheld VHF/UHF radio and four of the vehicles would have a permanently installed Red Cross 47.420 MHz radio.  In order to gain experience, only non-hams were to operate the Red Cross radios.  A base station would be situated at the Bridgeport chapter house.  Two radios capable of simultaneously handling a total of four amateur VHF/UHF frequencies and a radio operating on the 47.420 MHz frequency were installed at the base.  The amateur radios would use repeaters located in Norwalk, Fairfield, Milford and Bridgeport.  There are no repeaters for the Red Cross radios in the area.

GBARC supports the Red Cross with nine fully qualified and trained Red Cross volunteers.  Those supporting the drill were Tom, W1TFD, Rich, KB1IWX, Larry, W1LAG, Dave, KD1BD, John, KA1JXW, and Vinny, KB1PFO.

Just minutes prior to the scheduled start a real incident occurred and the volunteers responded accordingly as detailed in the Stratford Star article shown below.  Also shown are photos taken during and after the event. 

Radio contact using the 47.420 MHz frequency was not possible once the vehicles were on scene at the incident site 4 miles away in Stratford.  This was due to an intervening hill that prevented line of site communications.  Amateur radio performed flawlessly using repeaters in Bridgeport and Fairfield.  The variety of available repeater locations and their antenna height provides the flexibility and capability to virtually eliminate communications problems due to terrain or structural interference.