About Wilson Co. ARES

Wilson County Amateur Radio Emergency Service is a group of Amateur Radio Operators who volunteer to provide emergency communications during times of severe weather, disaster, and other events where having a reliable communications system when others have failed or are overloaded.

What we do...

Wilson County ARES provides communications services for a number of agencies in Wilson County.  This includes supplying Amateur Radio Operators to the National Weather Service during severe weather outbreaks.  These operators provide an invaluable service not only to Wilson County but to the entire Middle Tennessee region.  We also have a number of operators who have the ability to deploy to a disaster site or other location(s) where normal methods of communication are not working.  We are also available to help with large public events where additional communications are required to help protect the health and welfare of the general public.

Who we serve...

• National Weather Service - The Nashville office of the National Weather Service is our primary customer.  The NWS office is located just inside Wilson County and we are the primary providers of Amateur Radio Operators for the NWS during widespread severe weather outbreaks in Middle Tennessee.
• Wilson County Emergency Management Agency - This is the local Emergency Management, Emergency Medical Service, and Fire Department in Wilson County.  We have amateur radios in the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) as well as on the Mobile Command Post allowing us to provide a backup channel for communications to provide support of this agency during a large-scale disaster, public event, or other scenario where we can provide assistance and reduce the load on the emergency service frequencies.  We hope to have additional capabilities (HF and Winlink) available at WEMA within the near future.
• University Medical Center - We also have amateur radios at the local hospital.  While we currently only have VHF/UHF capabilities at WEMA, UMC has HF capabilities in addition to VHF & UHF.  This allows us to ensure that the hospital remains in contact with local and regional agencies and other hospitals even when all other methods have failed or become so overloaded they are ineffective or otherwise inaccessible.

 For more information on the the American Radio Relay League's Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES)® program, click the logo to the left.  The page will open in a new window.