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Overview
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RACES
Radio Amateur Civil Emergency
Services
Overview
RACES provides a pool of
emergency communications personnel that can be called on in
time of need. RACES groups across the country prepare
themselves for the inevitable day when they will be called
upon. When a local, county, or state government agency
activates its RACES group, that group will use its resources
to meet whatever need that agency has.
Founded in 1952,
the Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES) is a
public service that provides a reserve communications group
within government agencies in times of extraordinary need.
During periods of activation, RACES personnel are called
upon to perform many tasks for the government agencies they
serve. Although the exact nature of each activation will be
different, the common thread is communications.
The Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) is responsible for the
regulation of RACES operations. Each RACES group is
administrated by a local, county, or state civil defense
agency responsible for disaster services. This civil defense
agency is typically an emergency services or emergency
management organization, sometimes within another agency
such as police or fire. In some areas, RACES may be part of
an agency's Auxiliary Communications Service (ACS). Some
RACES groups call themselves by other names (often to avoid
confusion with similar terms such as “racist” or
“horse races”), such as ACS, DCS (Disaster
Communications Service), or ECS (Emergency Communications
Service). Groups of licensed Radio Amateurs certified by a
government civil defense (or equivalent) agency are actually
RACES groups (as far as the FCC is concerned), no matter
what they are called, and operate under the FCC’s RACES
regulations.
The importance
of RACES operations cannot be stressed enough. The Amateur
Radio Regulations, Part 97, Subpart F, were created by the
FCC to describe RACES operations in detail. Although no
longer issued (but still valid), special licenses were
issued in the past by the FCC to government agencies for
RACES operations
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