Lee County ARES Participate in Williamson County ARES Hurricane Ian Exercise

WC-ARES offered this unannounced exercise in order to accomplish two things:

In Part 1, members would provide Incident Command with real-time graphical input on the location and effects of Hurricane Ian by downloading the latest satellite weather images.  In Part 2, members would attempt to decode a local SSTV (Slow Scan TV) signal broadcast on 2m and verify with Incident Commander that they have received the SSTV graphic.  (There were multiple ways to accomplish it).

Lee County ARES did not have the equipment to receive images directly from the NOAA satellite, but we found a way to request and download those images via radio through the Winlink Catalog feature and then transmit them to the Incident Commander.  We learned for the first time how to receive a SSTV image via radio. Two of our members, WB5YYQ and W5TRL were able to transmit SSTV images back and forth for the first time.