Travis County ARES

TCARES is committed to maintaining a high current level of training and readiness for its members. To meet this goal, multiple training programs exist. Lew Thompson, W5IFQ has devised the Incentive Achevement Program to provide a continuing skills improvement training plan. Please download the plan and begin reviewing which tasks you can already claim credit for. All members should begin to complete the remaining items required for the next (or first) certification level.

Monthly meetings along with weekly Voice and Packet nets contain training segments or training schedule reminders. ARES as an organization is now being driven to adhere to the National Incident Management System. The reason for this is Homeland Security and other Federal and State agencies have adopted NIMS as a event management plan. ARES members will be expected to understand and operate under NIMS during activations. Without this training, you may be excluded from participating or gaining access to emergency sites during activations.

Always check the AustinHams.org site for additional  training details concerning license upgrades, Helocopter Landing Zone, Skywarn and similar. Sometimes there are class notices from other ham organizations and public service groups listed there.

NIMS courses are offered by FEMA and are are available on their website.

Other training in the Incentive Achievement Program is offered by the ARRL. Please refer to the course catalog on the ARRL site.

Winlink and Airmail are very important to our ARCHES hospital communications program. Lew has also created detailed guides for  installing and using Airmail with the internationally supported Winlink system. Please download this document for future reference.

You can find the closest Winlink RMS packet station using the AD5OO Packet Station Locator. Output from this tool can also be saved on your laptop for future reference during deployments.

Here are some photos from a recent Simulated Emergency Tests (SET).