Reception Survey Study

In order to both support operations during the COVID-19 shelter-at-home directive, and to help plan how to optimize future communications activities, during the four weeks from March 23 through April 13, 2020, Mountain View ARES/RACES staff conducted a test of our ability to hear each other from our home locations during our regular Monday night check-in nets.

What we did

During check-ins, participating operators recorded how well they could hear the others who were checking in using a simple coding scheme:

• Good reception.

• Poor reception.

• Unintelligible, or no signal heard.

These reception reports were entered into an online form at the end of each net. The form also asked for information about each participant's radio and antenna.

Full presentation

How we analyzed the data

Leslie (KK6EKN) and Micky (KK6EEI) merged these datasets and produced some charts analyzing the results. Forrest (AJ6JN) wrote a program that converted the data into a set of maps for each operator showing how well others could hear them, and how well they could hear others.

How to read the maps

The survey study folder contains two types of maps:

• Transmit maps: how well other operators heard a single person transmitting.

• Receiver maps: how well one person heard everyone else.

There is one transmit map, named callsign transmit map.png, for each person who checked in during at least one of the four study weeks, and one receiver map, named callsign receiver map.png, for each person who submitted a reception form for one of the four study weeks.

If a participant informed us that they changed their equipment or location from one week to another, they will have multiple transmit or receiver maps, one for each equipment/location. Those participants will have a dash and week numbers after their callsigns to indicate which week's equipment is being refered to. For example:

• AE6EO-1 transmit map.png uses AE6EO's location and equipment during survey week 1.

• KM6EEI-34 transmit map.png uses KM6EEI's location and equipment during survey weeks 3 and 4.

The background for all maps consists of the City of Mountain View, with CERT neighborhood boundaries indicated. The icons indicate:

• Blue radio: the transmitter on transmit maps, and the receiver on receiver maps.

• Green person: good reception reported

• Yellow person: poor reception reported

• Red person: unintelligible, or no signal reported