In brief, the Incident Command System (ICS) forms were developed by FEMA (the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency) and are designed to facilitate structured communication during disaster response, exercises, or other coordinated efforts. The most commonly used ICS form in Winlink is the ICS-213, a general message form for transmitting formal messages between agencies or operators.
In Winklink Express, these are HTML forms which are filled out in a browser that is then transferred to a Winlink Express email as text for sending. We don't have the HTML form BUT we do have the text form as a TEMPLATE in the SEND VMAIL dialog box -- buy only in EMCOMM mode.
For those wishing to practice sending ICS forms using VarAC, this would seem to be useful. My inclination is to make it optional for those that might want to use it and as a reminder to everyone else that the capability exists.
However, we don't want to use the CF for anything other than "genuine emergency situations or emergency drills." This would seem to fall under an "emergency drill" with the actual traffic sent on another slot via automatic QSY.
Thoughts?
Mark KB0US
Sure, at least try it so everyone knows how to use VARAC and the form, that would make a good EmComm drill