Salt Lake County ARES

You are invited to join us tonight for the May meeting of Salt Lake County ARES. This will be our last meeting in the Intermountain Health Admin Building, 4646 Lake Park Blvd. in West Valley City. This has been a great meeting place with good audio-visual facilities, tons of parking, and the luxury of being able to stay after the meeting to talk individually to each other.

The building has been sold, and its new owners want to move in at the end of June, so our hosts will have to hustle to get their stuff moved out. There’s no word yet on where the 448.55 repeater at Lake Park will find a new home. I’ve suggested to the Intermountain Test Net folks, who administer the repeater, that either LDS Hospital or Primary Childredn’s Outpatient Services at the U of U campus would be upgrades in terms of coverage.

Our June 24th meeting will be hosted by Salt Lake County Emergency Management at their Emergency Coordination Center, 3380 South 900 West. Then, starting with the July 22nd meeting, our new home will be Classroom 3 at the Intermountain Health Employee Services Center on College Drive in Murray. This building also has generous parking, with a shorter walk from the lot to the door. It’s also adjacent to TRAX and buses. The room is slightly smaller than the auditoriums at Lake Park, but well-equipped.

On the agenda tonight:

(1)  The 2026 Pony Express Reride is just over three weeks away. Rulon, K7BTU will discuss the few remaining details to be finalized, and make a last call for volunteers to support the teams riding horses on the trail.

(2)  Weekly activations with partners: Yesterday, we activated IMED in Murray and LDS Hospital to check into the county’s weekly net for EOCs. We expect to soon add Primary Children’s, Riverton and Alta View hospitals. This relationship is growing quickly, and may soon require a few more ARES members to earn badge access at hospitals.

(3)  A joint exercise with Intermountain is being planned for the fall, date TBD, possibly coinciding with this year’s Utah Section ARES Simulated Emergency Test. One goal will be to pass data supporting simulated emergency orders from hospitals to Intermountain Supply Chain, expanding on our success during our Shakeout exercise last month. 

(4)  I’ll share photos and observations from the Nevada Open Road Challenge, a large motorsport event supported by hams over a 90-mile road course.

Rocky Mountain Power Repeaters

On a drive from Las Vegas to Salt Lake County two weeks ago, I confirmed that our new 70cm analog repeater on Traverse Ridge has coverage south on I-15 to the Utah/Juab County line while running 5 watts in my mobile, and all the way to Nephi at 25 watts.

I reported this finding to Brian, AC7QE at Rocky Mountain Power in Portland, who replied with this update on the DMR repeater at the same site:

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The DMR repeater will support several talkgroups, including:

3149 / Utah
31491 / Utah North
31492 / Utah Davis
31493 / Utah Northeast
3116 / Idaho
3156 / Wyoming
3141 / Oregon
8951 / TAC 1
8952 / TAC 2
8953 / TAC 3
310 / TAC 310
311 / TAC 311
312 / TAC 312
31428 / ARRG 2

I see that there are some ARES-specific talkgroups defined for Utah and Idaho.  If those would be useful (or any others), please let me know.  Many of our repeaters over here support a lot of talkgroups and they do not seem to get too chaotic (most end up being PTT-triggered).

We currently have the Pony Express event scheduled for June 21st & 22nd and plan to have the Traverse Ridge repeater isolated during that time. —————-

What other uses could we find for these new repeaters? A multi-county ARES net covering Weber, Davis, Salt Lake, Utah and Juab Counties would appear possible on the analog repeater. With the Utah Section ARES Net having fizzled on HF, would it make sense to try a statewide ARES net on DMR? A regional DMR net with surrounding states? Give it some thought, and share your ideas tonight.

The Lake Park Building will be open by 1830 MT, and our meeting will start at 1900. If you can’t make it in person, join us via MicroSoft Teams at this link. Thanks for your interest and support for Salt Lake County ARES!