Dave Thompson

yeah that sounds pretty typical honestly, most activations are a lot of hurry up and wait especially for flooding or weather events that dont quite hit worst case scenario. the busy ones are when infrastructure actually fails and suddenly you're the only link between two sites and that's when all the training either clicks or it doesnt.
the ICS stuff really does matter, i remember my first activation years ago before i'd done any of the online courses and i felt completely lost when the incident commander started talking about logistics section and ops section and i had no idea where radio fit into any of it. now i help teach the ARES intro training for our group and i always tell new members do the ICS courses before anything else, the antenna stuff you can learn on the fly but not knowing the command structure when you're actually deployed is a real problem.
sounds like your EC ran a tight ship too which helps a lot. not every group has that, ive been to exercises with other counties where it was kind of chaos and nobody was really sure who was in charge of what. glad your first one went well

came from a TS-590SG myself and the transition was a little weird at first because the Kenwood rx really is excellent and the 7300 just sounds different like you said, not worse just takes adjusting the settings to get it where you want. i spent a good afternoon messing with the PBT and the treble/bass on the receive audio and got it to a place i really like now. theres a bunch of youtube videos of guys going through their exact menu settings which honestly saved me a lot of time

ok so this has been bugging me since i got my ticket a few months ago. i've been checking into the tuesday night local net and i'm still not totally sure i'm doing it right. like when the net control calls for check-ins i just say my callsign and that i have nothing for the net, but sometimes i hear other people give their full name and location and signal report stuff and other times they just throw their call out there and that's it.
is there like a standard way this is supposed to go or does every net kind of do its own thing? also i noticed on a few occasions someone came on frequency mid-net and just started talking over everything which seemed rude but i didn't want to assume. part of me wonders if there's an unwritten rulebook somewhere that everyone got except me lol

yeah the tech HF privileges are a little scattered but once you see them laid out it makes more sense. basically as a tech you get CW privileges on a few HF bands, 80, 40, 15, and 10 meters i think, but the only place you can do phone (voice) is on 10 meters, specifically 28.300 to 28.500 MHz. thats it for voice on HF until you upgrade. the 200 watt thing is specifically for the HF tech phone and image segment on 10m, your other privileges arent limited the same way. honestly the easiest thing is just to pull up the actual ARRL band plan chart they have on their site, it breaks down privileges by license class visually and its way easier than reading the raw part 97 text. and dont stress too much about accidentally transmitting somewhere wrong, just double check before you key up and youll be fine

honestly as someone who's still pretty new to chasing DX this thread is helpful. i tried to work a few pileups last year and basically just gave up after like 20 minutes of getting nowhere. didnt really understand the split concept properly at first, kept transmitting on their frequency like an idiot until someone on the cluster told me to read the DX code of conduct lol.
question though — does antenna make a big difference here or is it mostly technique? im running a modest station, G5RV at about 30 feet, 100 watts. i got through to a couple Caribbean stations which arent super rare but anything really DX i havent cracked yet. wondering if theres a point where gear just matters more than operating skill