Salt Lake County ARES

Tomorrow (Wednesday 4/22/26) is the monthly Salt Lake County ARES meeting, 1900 MT at the Intermountain Health Admin Building, 4646 Lake Park Blvd. in West Valley City.

For those who can’t be there in person, the meeting will be available online via MS Teams at this link.

On the agenda, we’ll look back at the Great Utah Shakeout, which for SLCO ARES saw an ambitious goal of demonstrating ham support for the Intermountain Supply Chain Center (SCC) in Midvale. This large, automated warehouse operation is the source of meals, linens, pharmaceuticals and every other logistical need of Intermountain facilities within a three-hour drive.

Because the warehouse sees 15,000 individual order lines on an average day, voice modes would not have the accuracy, or anywhere near the speed, required to keep the facility responding at normal speed during a network outage. In the future, AREDN will easily handle this load. But in the meantime, I proposed testing transmission of simulated order files using attachments to Winlink, transmitted over a standard FM analog voice channel.

In a nutshell, it worked. We transferred CSV data files in a format directly importable into their automation, showed we could keep up with their volume, and SCC managers are enthusiastic about refining the process. But it wasn’t pretty! We’ll go over the after-action report and show you the challenges we had, and do a live demonstration of an alternative to Winlink which promises to simplify and further speed up the process.

We’ll also have brief reports on:

• Shakeout drills conducted at Salt Lake County, Sandy and Cottonwood Heights
• Finalization of the roster for the Pony Express Reride in June
• A new 70cm analog repeater for IMED with enhanced features

As always, we’ll be open by 1830, and the room will be open after the meeting till 2130 to allow everyone to catch up with each other on informal collaborations and personal projects. See you there!