Callup Procedures/Data Base Requirements

There's really two parts to the callup. The first part is how we, as the PPARES staff, are organized BEFORE an event occurs. This is based on the information you've given us to put in our data base. That would be primarily your phone numbers, your availability, and your level of participation. If you haven't registered on the web site recently, we may not have all the info we need for you. If you're not sure when you last registered, send me an e-mail or call me, and I'll tell you what I have for you. If you don't have internet access, my phone works, and I AM in the phone book. Give me a call, and I can send you a registration form.

The second part is the actual callup itself. There is a specific set of things that we do. I want to go over these for the members that have been around for a while, because our callup process has evolved over the last few years, and you may not be familiar with it. And for the newer members, you might be wondering how you'd get called up in an emergency.

We can do two types of callups: either a limited or a full callup. An example of a full callup was in Oct 1997 when we were asked to support the city during a major blizzard. We needed as many people as possible for that event, and ended up using close to 100 hams. An example of a limited callup might be if we were asked to support search and rescue to put people at 5 or 6 trailheads to watch for a missing hiker.

Limited or full, the callup begins like this.
The first thing we do is send an e-mail to the members that have alphanumeric pagers, or have cell phones that can receive text messages. Again, this is based on what's in the data base. This should be done BEFORE any net actually begins on the air. Assuming the phone system is working, this is by far the quickest way to notify a large number of members. With a single e-mail addressed to these pagers, usually within about 5-10 minutes, almost 50 members will get a short text message containing instructions on how to report in. This works great 24 hours a day. Whether you're at work, home, at the movies, a store or restaurant, or asleep in bed, and at other times you're away from a radio. I set my pager to vibrate during the day, and to beep when I take it off at home. Bottom line is if you have an text pager and have not registered it with us, and want to receive notifications this way, you have to register it with us.

Step Two.
Step two is not only a means of notification, it's also a fallback in case we can't send a text page due to a phone outage. While the text pagers are the most efficient, step two is the most reliable. And this is notification via ham radio. If you don't know it by now, this repeater, the PPFMA 97 repeater, is the primary ARES® repeater. Any event will always begin on this frequency. If you keep a radio or scanner on 97 all the time, you'll never miss a thing. Note that I said the event would begin on this "frequency", not "repeater". Because even if the repeater is down, we'll make an attempt to spread the word using 97 simplex, perhaps moving everyone to a repeater that is working.

This second step is accomplished by sending the DTMF tone sequence of 697 over this repeater. You might be wondering about the DTMF test that's performed weekly, just prior to the ARES® net. Well, some radios have what's known as DTMF squelch, where a series of touchtone's activates your speaker. When the repeater sends the 697, your speaker is opened, and you'll then hear whatever message by the EC. Not all radios these days have this feature, but we still send the tones nevertheless. There are still older radios using DTMF squelch. Plus, the tones themselves are attention-getters.

I should add that immediately after the DTMF 697 sequence is sent, there are two tones transmitted. These tones can also be used to page you, but most radios don't come with two-tone paging built in. There are aftermarket products known as two-tone paging decoders that can be purchased and used to squelch your radio until this two-tone sequence is heard. The two tones are So between the text pagers and the DTMF paging on 97, we'll probably round up enough PPARES members to provide the necessary people needed to respond to an event.

If the phones are working, then step three is to send out numerical pages to folks that have numeric message pagers. These are the kind of pagers that someone can dial and punch in a telephone number for you to call them back at. Only difference is, the way we use it is to punch in the numeric message 146970 which represents frequency; this should tell you to tune to 146.97 for a callup.

Only after all of these methods are exhausted do we consider making a single phone call. The phone calls are very inefficient. So step 4 is to go back to the roster and make phone calls to the rest of the membership if we still don't have enough people. The phone callup is the least effective because we get answering machines, disconnected numbers, wrong numbers, or family members that don't pass on the message to you . A full telephone callup of our 200 plus members could take several hours. So we generally use this as a last resort only. So who would we call via telephone?

When you registered recently via the web page, you may remember the two categories of information for availability and participation. We use these because this helps to make our phone calls as effective as possible.

By using your availability info, we can be selective on who we call based on time of the day. In the data base, you're listed as either available 24 hours 7 days a week, or weekday evenings, weekday days, weekend evenings, or weekend days or some combination. I can sort the data base on those categories, and get a list of ONLY the people that are available for that time. So if I need someone at 11 am on a Wednesday, I'll look for hams that are either available 24/7, or available weekdays during the day.

The other category of information is that of participation. Some of you explicitly want to participate in emergencies, but not public service events. Others might want to participate in public service events, but not emergencies. I'll use that info to determine who to call. I will not call someone that doesn't meet both the availability and participation criteria.

Now, if we need something specific, like a generator, or ATV, then we will make a call to the people that have those capabilities indicated in the data base.

So I'll close by saying that if you've NEVER registered, or if your registration is so old that I don't have availability info, you'll never get a phone call. On the other hand, remember this: If you've told me you're available 24/7 and will respond to emergencies, you may very well get a phone call at 3 am, and I have made those kinds of calls before. Please! Make sure your spouse or family members are aware that, although rare, I may call at that hour. I don't want to get chewed out by an angry wife at that hour. I may be reluctant to call again if that happens.