Emergency Communications

While out at a wheeling event on Gold Mountain Trail in Big Bear Lake, one of the Jeeps had a mechanical failure.  Cell phone signals were spotty on some of the phones, and completely absent on others, like mine.  One of the Jeepers had their Yaesu dual band handy talkie.  A new HAM he knew the importance of having secondary communications while on the trail.  They tried making a call to the local repeater, 147.33 Mhz.  Not able to get anyone on the repeater one of the party knew that I had been a HAM for a number of years, and passed the radio to me.

I tried making a call on the repeater and I noticed there was no squelch tail.  I know some repeaters can have a short tail, but you usually hear, or see something after your transmission.  Looking at the radio, that I had never used before, I started going through the basic checks.  Was a transmit off set, set?  Yes, +600Khz.  Was there a subaudible tone turned on, and if so what frequency tone was it?

Well I saw no indication on the display that a subaudible tone was active.  Eventually I did find where you set the subaudible tone, but I didn’t have anyway of knowing what tone this repeater required, and without cell phone Internet access I couldn’t look it up.

Two things we all should learn from this. 

• Take your radio’s Users manual and keep it with the radio. 
• Set up and test your radio prior to going out on your wheeling event.  

Even if this means stopping somewhere while you still have Internet access so you can look up the information, before heading out on the trail.

This time the emergency (really wasn’t) was just a broken Jeep, not a life threatening injury.

Oh! That subaudible tone? 131.8