Planning Your First Amateur Radio Exercise or Event
So you have been contacted and asked to support an event by providing radio communications or you have been requested to participate in an exercise as the communications coordinator. Perhaps you have lent your expertise as a radio communications volunteer or other activity in the past and now you are being asked to step up to the plate and organize such an effort. Now what?
If you’re like some of us, fear and pandemonium set in. The blood drains from your face and your palms are sweating profusely. With a shaky voice and a quivering lip, you agree to organize radio communications for the event. You have visions of the past where all you had to do was show up at your assigned location and do your part, then go home. Life was good, wasn’t it? The situation is not quite so rosy when you are the coordinator for amateur radio communications.
I hope I haven’t scared anyone off yet, but it is a very different perspective when you are the one leading the effort. If you have never been in a position to supervise or lead people, that will be a bit of a challenge. You will need to learn how to handle people and all the personalities they bring to the table along with all the necessary planning activities. You may have even witnessed some of those idiosyncrasies with others in the past. Having previous leadership experience will certainly help in the long run. But do not be dismayed. Help is on the way. Much of planning involves dealing with people, too.
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This article is not intended as a cookbook plan for you to follow and be able to run with it. It is meant to give you ideas and suggestions that you may want to consider when planning for your own event. Only you know the situations you will encounter in the field and you must be prepared to meet those challenges.
Safety
Before I delve into specifics of planning and preparation for your event, I want to take a moment to talk about safety. Personal safety must be first and foremost in your mind as you draft your communications plan. You must keep your volunteers safe! The last thing you want to do is send someone home in a poorer condition than when they arrived. It goes without saying that a major topic of your plan will be safety pertaining to radio operations. This would include electrical safety, erecting antennas, RF radiation, etc. That is a different article. However, there are other aspects of safety that should be considered:
• Directions are needed on how to get to the communicator’s assigned location. Make sure everyone knows exactly where they are going. A few years ago at the Patriot North exercise, I was assigned as a Salvation Army Team Emergency Radio Network (SATERN) radio shadow to one of the command staff and we were asked to deliver lunches to an airfield at Fort McCoy (see CQ October 2019 for more information about the Patriot North exercise). I had not been there before but the driver had, so I thought, “No problem.” Well, it turns out there are two airfields near each other and, of course, we went to the wrong one. We didn’t know how to get to the correct one and it was fortunate we were able to contact the other
