Arc Squared, or Arc² the American Red Cross amateur radio club -Northern New Jersey Regional chapter, Fairfield, NJ.  Our base station, NJ2RC is located in the chapter Disaster Operations Center, and is manned during a disaster by ARCSquared members who have amateur radio licenses.

Purpose and reason for existence: 

Experience with hurricane Katrina and other recent disaster responses has demonstrated the need for reliable communications in order to effectively distribute mass care.  And  those experiences demonstrate  a need for interoperability, or the ability to communicate with others outside of the Red Cross family who are responding to a national or regional  disaster, in order to both navigate the disaster struck region and to coordinate care. 

 

Many organizations look to Amateur (ham) Radio as an established source of communication, utilizing frequencies that are usable and utilizable across jurisdictional and organizational boundaries, and to provide a backbone and infrastructure that will become of paramount importance should other means of communication fail or become overloaded.

 

Like OEM, Police and Fire agencies, the national American Red Cross system utilizes several commercial (low band) frequencies for radio communication. These frequencies are reserved to the American Red Cross, and will provide capability for communication between emergency response vehicles (ERV’s) and the chapter in some cases, as well as communication between our chapter vehicles and other chapter’s vehicles deployed in the event of a disaster. 

 

So, to provide for reliable communications to support chapter disaster relief operations, and to provide for interoperability with other agencies and the State and County OEM, chapter  volunteers organized ARCSquared for the purpose of emergency communications. Arc2 members are all volunteers, and are therefore uncompensated for their activities on behalf of ARC2.