Kevin Anderson

yeah that gap between training and a real activation is real and i dont think there's any way around it honestly. i've been involved with ARES for maybe 12 years now and i still tell new members that the SET exercises are great for muscle memory on procedures but they can't simulate the ambient chaos of an actual EOC with real stress and real served agency staff who have no idea what we do or why we're there. the traffic surge thing you described is super common. what i do now is keep a simple log sheet right in front of me and just write down requests as they come in, numbered, so i dont lose track when things pile up. sounds obvious but in the moment it helps a lot. and yeah, the go bag with food and water and a change of clothes is not optional, that's a lesson everyone learns the hard way at least once. sounds like you handled it well though, the fact that you were self-aware about the radiogram formatting means you were paying attention to the right stuff.

the TX bandwidth thing is probably your culprit honestly. a lot of people tighten that up thinking they're being neighborly on the band but if you narrow it too much on SSB you're chopping off the high end presence frequencies and that's exactly what gives you that muffled barrel sound. on the 7300 i'd reset the TX bandwidth to something like 100-2900 hz as a starting point and see how that changes the reports you're getting. also check your mic gain — if you're overdriving it even a little that causes compression artifacts that sound terrible. watch the ALC meter while you're talking and you want it barely moving on speech peaks, not pinned. the built in mic on the 7300 isnt bad honestly, i used mine for about two years before switching and people said it sounded fine. the radio itself has decent processing built in, just dont crank the speech processor too high, that's another thing that'll make you sound like youre in a tin can real fast.

curious what your upstream bandwidth looks like at the rural site. ive found that a lot of these sync/drift issues people blame on software are actually just asymmetric bandwidth doing weird things to the streams — especially if youre on a rural connection that might be satellite or older DSL where upload is really constrained. the SDR stream is pretty greedy compared to just voice audio and if theyre competing for the same upload pipe things get messy fast. also not sure if you tried this but theres a guy on the RemoteHams forums who posted a config a while back for running the IC-7300 USB in a way that uses the radios own panadapter data instead of a separate SDR and apparently it cleans things up considerably. cant remember his callsign but worth digging through the threads over there if you havent already.