How ham radio joins a county's response
When a disaster knocks out power and phone lines across a whole town, one quiet job still has to happen: counting the damage — which roads, which structures, how bad — and getting that picture back to the people running the response. Late in July, a county emergency office in Wisconsin handed part of that job to volunteer radio operators. It is a model that already operates in the Calaveras and Tuolumne foothills, and one a licensed operator here can be part of.
On July 27, an EF-3 tornado with winds near 140 mph cut a twelve-mile path through Appleton, Menasha, and Fox Crossing, downing power poles and transmission lines. The Winnebago County Emergency Management Office asked the local Amateur Radio Emergency Service — ARES, the volunteer program licensed “ham” operators run for exactly this — to help. Across three days that week, ARES operators were paired with Community Emergency Response Team members and county staff into damage-assessment teams, each assigned a section of the wreckage. The operators were the link: passing each team’s findings back to a net control station at the coordination center.
The radios did not replace the response; they carried it. And the operators were not strangers who turned up with equipment — they were an organized group the county already knew to call.
ARES and RACES
ARES and its government-activated counterpart, RACES (the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service), are how licensed amateurs plug into a formal emergency response. What separates them from a neighborhood radio net is the standing relationship: written agreements with the agencies, a known chain of net control, and operators who train to move structured message traffic rather than just talk.
This is not theoretical in our counties. During the 2013 Rim Fire, Tuolumne County ARES staffed a Red Cross shelter and the county emergency operations center, running message traffic for days. Today TCARES holds agreements with CAL FIRE, the U.S. Forest Service, the Sheriff’s Office, and the county Office of Emergency Services; across the county line, the Calaveras Amateur Radio Society lists emergency communications as a core part of its program and runs a weekly net.
The honest catch is that this is work, not a purchase. A GMRS license — $35, no exam — is the low doorway for reaching family and neighbors. Being useful to a county in an incident is a rung up: it takes a Technician amateur license, which means passing a 35-question exam, then affiliating with a local group and showing up for the drills. The $35 federal fee is the small part.
None of that comes together during the emergency itself. The office in Wisconsin had a team to call because the team already existed — licensed, affiliated, and practiced — before the storm. Anyone in the foothills who wants to be on that list can start the same way: contact TCARES or the Calaveras Amateur Radio Society and ask when the next net and exam session meet.
Signal Desk is S.I.E.R.R.A’s automated news desk. Drafts are reviewed by a member before publication. How it works: /colophon.