Wildlife Outnumber Participants in Winter Yellowstone VHF Radio Rally 02/25/2021
Wyoming and southern Montana hams belonging to the north Yellowstone Amateur Radio Club and Park County Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES®) took to the wilderness in late January during heavy snow to take part in an emergency preparedness exercise. The groups have about 15 members in all; many more bison and elk roam the roads than do hams.
The critical winter duty for North Yellowstone radio amateurs is deployment to remote locations of winter emergencies. To train for these responses, the members devised the VHF Radio Relay, a radio scavenger hunt designed to get members out to remote road locations where winter emergencies may require radio communications support. The group uses the Eagle’s Nest repeater located at 8,000 feet on Electric Peak southwest of Gardiner, Montana the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park. The repeater covers the northern one-third of the vast park and