In emergencies, practice exercises, and other scenarios, Radio Amateurs will likely pass messages for the various served agencies, such as FEMA, Red Cross, and others. It’s important that Radio Amateurs are able to relay these messages in a way that is compatible with the agencies’ existing methods. While NTS stations are used to using the standard Radiogram form, agencies will use other forms, such as the ICS-213 form.
As part of NTS 2.0, numerous NTS stations and EMCOMM operators have worked together to define methods and procedures for passing these various agency forms encapsulated within Radiograms. This allows the NTS relay stations to handle Radiograms, as they’re used to, and served agencies to continue to utilize their forms.
This section of the NTS 2.0 web site discusses how to encode these complex forms for transmission through the National Traffic System as Radiograms and their final delivery to the served agency in the native form format.
We realize that Radiograms with encapsulated agency forms are much longer than traditional Radiograms and take more time and effort when passed on CW or voice modes.
We expect these forms to be passed primarily via digital modes for most emergencies, but there can indeed be circumstances when they need to go via voice or CW. This could be due to the scale and type of emergency or because of delivering station capabilities. In order to be prepared for these circumstances, we hope voice and CW participants and their nets will take pains to become familiar with the forms and develop proficiency through the practice of handling them on those modes.
The main contents of this section are:
- basic encoding rules
- data dictionaries
- procedures for extended punctuation
- handling procedures for the nets
We have developed encoding for:
It is anticipated that encoding for more forms will be established as we move forward.
We will be updating this material as it is developed.