Inviting an official in from a served agency to hear someone repeating "we are 1F SC", endlessly, in no way shows them what Amateur Radio communications can offer. Allowing them to interact with other officials, in a conversational environment, can show them that information can be passed reliably from station to station and make them more comfortable with Amateur Radio.
I am in no way proposing that this event is a communication exercise intended to "stress" the system or provide meaningful training.
To "Kassy"
The question that keeps popping into my mind - if you are not operating a class "F" station, why is this a concern at all for you?
Because I DO operate in emergency conditions and I DO operate from EOCs under those conditions and I think we NEED something like FD to truly stress the operators. FD exists to serve that purpose, why not use it for that purpose? I just don't happen to do FD from an EOC. I do FD from THE FIELD, because it is the only large-scale FIELD training event available. And I think that matters.
It drives me crazy that we do these completely fake "training" events. Messages get passed, nobody's checking for accuracy, incredibly sloppy net control procedures, tactical callsigns used without the legal addition of ham callsigns...lots of things done wrong, lots of messages that did not get through. And nobody publishes the "score". Nobody says "this station failed to achieve a passing score". And we just check the box, "Did the emergency exercise. Done."
That's why. Because I think it matters.
- k