Tag: ares-races
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FEMA ICS Courses for Hams: IS-100, 200, 700, and 800 Explained
Served agencies keep asking hams for IS-100, IS-200, IS-700, and IS-800. Here’s what each course covers, which ones actually matter, and why the paperwork is worth a weekend.
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Why Ham Radio Matters: A Hobby, a Lifeline, and a Century of Proof
Why ham radio still matters: the hobby, what it does for you, your family, and your town, and a century of times it kept people alive when everything else failed.
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CERT and Amateur Radio: How the Programs Overlap
Part of our Clubs and Nets guide. CERT and ARES get confused for each other constantly, and while they are separate programs with different scopes, they overlap enough that many hams find real value in doing both. What CERT Actually Is Community Emergency Response Team training is a FEMA-backed program that teaches civilians basic disaster…
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Building a PACE Communications Plan for Grid-Down Scenarios
How to build a PACE (Primary, Alternate, Contingency, Emergency) radio communications plan combining GMRS, ham radio, and non-radio backups.
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Emergency Communications and Preparedness
A practical roadmap to EmComm capability, covering ARES and RACES, message formats, digital tools like Winlink, and what actually holds up when it matters.
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ICS-213 and Message Formats: How EmComm Traffic Actually Gets Passed
Passing a message accurately over a radio net is a specific skill with its own format, and ICS-213 is the standard form most served agencies actually expect. Here is how real message traffic gets handled.
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ARES vs RACES: How Emergency Communications Are Actually Organized
Nearly every EmComm post on this blog assumes a general familiarity with how volunteer emergency communications are organized. ARES and RACES are the two structures actually behind most of it, and they are not the same thing.