Dear PAT community,
please mention PAT in the form comments. Here's why:
We recently conducted a SoCal Shifting 2022 exercise.
The focus was on GIS enabled forms (DYFI, Check-in, Field Situation Report, Check-out).
We noticed some key differences in message handling between WLE and PAT generated messages:
1. PAT initiated messages do not generate a mappable FormData.txt as far as we can tell.
2. Due to 1. PAT messages will not be mapped in WLE, nor exported to CSV or KML, making the messages unavailable in summaries and postprocessing dashboards unless they are manually added.
With exercises and drills generating large traffic volumes, for example, 370+ messages in this relaxed exercise, it is understandable that net controls/traffic stations/served agencies use the WLE mapping and CSV export as an aggregator tool.
That also means that there is an increased chance that PAT generated messages are overlooked, which is something no agency or net control or traffic or sending station wants.
So please, may I suggest that you mention PAT in the Form Comments.
Net controls/traffic stations can do some post processing if they know what to look for.
To a net control/traffic stations PAT generated messages look identical to WLE (unless one checks the attachments of each and every message) but they do read the comments, so a heads up in comments helps.
Thank you for your attention and keep up the great work.
73 de Oliver K6OLI