• A technical solution that provides medical facilities (and others) with access to long-haul email communications with minimum dependency on infrastructural services, such as local telecommunications, power, etc.
• A communication system that is fast to deploy-activate, simple to use, and as simple as possible to manage and maintain during an emergency situation and emergency communications exercises.
• A system that provides electronic mail communications between Incident Command Centers (or EOCs) in support of their Hospital Incident Command System or equivalent.
• Emergency communications support provided to the hospitals by experienced and dedicated volunteers from the ham community.
• Radio station rig designs that can be reproduced by others, and software that can be freely used by anyone interested.
  

System Architecture

• A high-speed, private Local Area Network between the facilities being served. This LAN can interconnect the hospitals' Incident Command Centers (ICC or EOC), and it is normally not connected to the Internet.
• A computer server connected to LAN, running the BMERS software.
• The server is connected to our base radio station, which is equipped with an HF radio transceiver, a radio modem, and one or more HF antennas.
• The system makes use of the Amateur Radio Safety Foundation, Inc's (ARSFI) Winlink 2000 system to bridge the email communications between the facilities and the Internet.

• A single radio station with one trained operator can serve many end-users simultaneously over a potentially large local area.
• End users do not require an FCC radio amateur license or any radio operating experience.
  
• BMERS users can use any available computer (or tablet or smartphone) with a standard web browser to access the email service. No special software is required on users' computers, just a web browser and Wi-Fi.
• BMERS can be configured with predefined user accounts, typically based on HICS roles.
  
• Local users can exchange full-featured emails with attachments among them and communicate locally via text messaging (also provided by BMERS--see ahead) at full LAN speed.
• BMERS implements a number of features aimed to manage the use of the radio link's limited bandwidth (see "Bandwidth Control" below).
• Users' email accounts in BMERS are typically role-based and follow the staffing positions defined in the Incident Command System.
• Local users can use a "chat" tool to exchange instant text messages with each other and with the radio operator.
• Local users can see which other users on the local area are using BMERS at any given time. The available email address in the LAN are visible in an address book for quick access for email and text messaging communications.
• The Radio operator has access to a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for managing all the aspects of the system. This tool allows the operator to monitor the email queues, quickly switch between call signs if necessary, manage user accounts, broadcast alerts to all users, and more.

• Users have an email message size limit (it's configurable, but 1500 characters by default). The email interface displays a character counter showing how many characters are left when typing a message.
• Emails include instructions for replying, which include a request to keep replies small.
• The body of the message is stripped of unnecessary characters before sending.
• Headers and other control information is kept to a minimum.
• Regular emails cannot include attachments.

Under certain circumstances, trained operators can also use Winlink tools to remove the traffic jam at the remote end, but when this is not possible, the BMERS coperator can switch the operating callsign to work around the traffic jam.

When necessary, the operator has the power to enable specific accounts to send emails without size or attachment restrictions.

Software and Documentation

At the time of this writing, detailed installation and configuration documentation for the latest version (10.1.9+) is under development. You can find the latest available documentation, with links to the downloadable MS windows installer, in our Documents and Software page. Check that page for updates. BMERS has been mainly tested on Windows 10, but it has been reported to work in windows 7.

Installation is simple: download the installer, run it as Administrator (important), then follow the prompts on the screen. Please pay attention to the configuration instructions that are displayed during the installation.

IMPORTANT: BMERS is currently available as BETA software. Please help us make BMERS as useful as possible by reporting any issues to us. You can contact  vcid @ nih.gov for more details or to report problems.