According to a post on Mike Marek's Facebook page, the CAP will be conducting a nationwide communications exercise sometime between now and the 4th of July.
According to Marek: "Some time in the next few weeks, before July 4th, we will be conducting a national communications exercise. Of course, we will not announce the exact date ahead of time, but I am writing to advise you of the general scenario, so you can prepare. I told the region DCS-COMMs about this some time back, so hopefully many of you already know the general outline.
"The national elements of this exercise are driven by the need to ramp up our use of HF-ALE. Regions and Wing should lay their own plans for how you pursue the exercise internally, as long as you do not use commercial telecommunications systems.
"The exercise will begin with an e-mail. Wings will be asked to report readiness to deploy across wing boundaries, reporting specific bits of information. For example, number of air crews, ground teams, aircraft and ground team vehicles available to deploy to another wing, or something along those lines.
"After collecting the information (without using the commercial infrastructure) wings will use radio to deliver the information to one of the two formal National Command Net (NCN) stations in their region, using formal traffic. The National Command Net stations will deliver the messages to AVS during the day and/or to a special National Headquarters station during evening hours. Messages will be received during certain pre-announced hours for a certain number of days. We will not announce in advance the geographic location of this special "evening hours" station.
"Wings should be prepared to operate HF-ALE, either from a regular existing station, or from a temporary RDP station. Only formally-appointed NCN stations should sound on the NCN frequencies, designated Net 1 in the standard frequency load of CAP's HF radios.
"This structure obviously leaves a lot of discretion to the regions and wings as to how you internally distribute the request for information and receive it back. I encourage you to include as many of your members as possible using HF, VHF, and even ISR radios."
So to my regular HF monitoring team, time to gear up on the CAP HF nets and watch for some activity in the near future.
