The ECOMM drill

 I have always been a proponent of relaying messages because I realize that even HF has limitations. It's dependent on propagation. 

There's ground wave and skywave. Groundwave is straight radio to radio direct communication where the radio waves travel along the ground. Skywave is when the signal hits the ionosphere and 'skips' and bounces back to the ground. You can be either inside or outside of the skip zone. 

Enter the relay which nets use. You simply have someone in between you that has contact with you and the person you are trying to contact simply relay the message. A net I am on counts a relayed in check-in as a legitimate check in even though he could not contact net control. Most nets do this.

A decade or maybe more ago I was on a certain ham radio forum and decided to organize an ECOMM drill and see how fast we could relay a message across the country to HI and give a reply back to the point of origin. On top of this all participants were supposed to get the message and post the reply in an instant message to me.

While we did post the frequency on the internet board, use of the web was prohibited other than an IM to me when you got both halves of the message.

With about a month in advance warning everyone checked their gear and made all sorts of preparation. People greased their antennas to make the radio waves slip off of it faster, cleaned their rigs and everyone was pretty keyed up. 

The event covered several time zones so people made the necessary arrangements to be on station for the event. It was a pretty big thing to a number of people.

The starting station was in NH and the recipient was in HI. The message was "Orange Banana" and the reply was "Tropical fruit"

Neither the Hawaiian nor the New Hampshire station had both parts of the message and neither did anyone else (but me).

I had a couple over the house for the event. He was a ham that wanted to try my IC 7200 out as he was fairly recently licensed. I put him on the rig and I manned the laptop. His wife came along for the ride and she was a firecracker and I liked them both immediately. She was down to earth and funny as hell. 

At the appointed time I heard the CQ call from New Hampshire and maybe a half dozen people answered and the "Orange banana" was released and took off like a shot. About a minute later (if that) "Tropical fruit" was heard booming over the airwaves and for the next 20 minutes, maybe half hour people were CQing and trying to find someone that didn't have the word. After the first couple of minutes it sounded like everyone had gotten the word.

My IM box lit up like a pop flare and all IMs simply said, Orange banana/Tropical fruit and they just kept rolling in and I had to delete them to keep space on my IM box. It was probably well over 30 messages which meant at least that many participated.

One was a 2 meter station because a nearby ham forwarded it to him on 2 meters!

It proved that ham radio is a very useful tool for spreading messages if used properly. Getting a message out to 30 stations in such a short amount of time is simply amazing.