I’m looking to put some radio activities in to my Squadron parades and I’d like to work with a squadron in another wing or further afield if possible.
We parade on a Tuesday and Thursday evening but would happily organise a weekend event, if needed, if we could make it happen. Would anybody be up for working with us on this? I’d happily produce resources for sharing once we know what the activity would focus or work around.
Ideally, I’d like to get the squadron working with more distant squadrons on a variety of activities to put our lessons in to practice and I’m open to ideas.
I look forward to the, always positive, replies and ideas.
Assuming this would be on HF as other bands won’t have the legs for what you seem to be suggesting, unless you are on the top of a conveniently large hill!
At a previous unit we were able to get in touch with three local Squadrons who were all radio savvy (as in had a clued up Radio Officer on unit)
All needed VHF to make it worthwhile and all were 6-10 miles away. Any further and we never made contact.
It helped that 2/3 shared the same parade nights offering flexibility, while the other matched one parade night so was a bit harder to coordinate as we could only consider 50% of the parade evenings and only then if it was convenient for both units.
so if you mean by “working with other Squadrons” = via radio
consider if anyone is in range of your kit,
then consider if they have the kit available,
then someone who is comfortable using it.
Although HF is the obvious choice for distance this is not the easiest for use during Parade evenings - mornings tend to work best (as I understand) and requires effort to firstly find someone and then coordinate with Squadrons outside of your Wing or even Region.
Far easier to consider VHF and a ~10mile range.
then just a matter of designing an exercise. the trick with Radio exercises is make the exercise easy so the effort and thought is in the accuracy of radio procedures and use and not the exercise itself.
as an example we’ve played “Guess who” over the radio, a familiar enough board game means there is no learning of the exercise involved.
Alternatively take a look at ACP 044 Chapter 9 (Sharepoint link) which has other Radio exercise ideas
if you mean by “working with other Squadrons” = joined up training, I am sure any Squadron would be happy to discuss options. Your Wing Radio Officer may well be worth chatting to on this topic to coordinate a Blues course as part of the effort
I would say that there are things in the pipeline which should make this sort of inter-squadron comms more easy to achieve and across greater distances. I guess they will be announced at the appropriate time, so “wait out” might not be a bad idea.
That bit is not too bad: the engineering part of radio can be quite interesting. It is the mundane task of then passing pointless messages between stations which I find mind-numbing. There is nothing impressive any more about talking to somebody a large distance away!
Comms to support a task is worthwhile. Comms to invent reasons to use comms is not.
seconded.
and why when i set up radio exercises it is purposely doing a familar task (board game or similiar) but talking over the radio.
Battleships is the default for many, but there are so many more options out there - this gets Cadets thinking about using the radio to pass messages over a distance via Radio - very few Cadets have an interest in the coded message element
We quite recently sorted out a VHF/UHF capability and now I just need to find somebody to talk to on that. If I then build up enough interest in radio it might be worthwhile rigging up something HF (if it is even practicable for us) but I’m not interested in wasting the time and effort to build an HF station if it will just rot.
As radio stations do seem to be sparse, something that can extend that range might well help to develop interest where the seed of interest exists. I wouldn’t be throwing novices onto HF though.
A local unit accidentally stumbled across something we were doing just on the unit handhelds… They quickly scarpered when asked to authenticate!
In the beginning, a familiar and simple “fun” task with radio as an added element is worthwhile to build confidence and basic competency… but there’s a stage at which something more is needed.
That sounds good. I’ll have a look at this one night this week. The idea is to just give cadets the opportunity to practice and use radio skills with others outside of the squadron. I find squadron activities don’t always have the right level of focus as they all know each other. Working with another squadron, preferably outside of the same wing, works require more professional approaches to procedures etc.
I’ll have a look at the activities as they may be useful in Squadron as well as outside.
Do have a look at Channel D. You just need a (Windows) laptop and internet. But it works with ATC procedures so it’s not just Skype. Your parade nights don’t sync with ours but if you want to do something on a weekend PM me.
