I was recently on a SAR mission where base was getting inteferring radio traffic on our "dedicated" SAR frequency. We had several teams in the field and the plan was to have each team change frequency and report in. Unfortunately, my team did not have the new frequency. In theory we all should have picked another universal frequency, unfortunately, base moved each team to the new frequency which we didn't have and kept us on the old frequency. While base has the capability to monitor multiple frequencies, our team felt quite alone.
Once we reached the search area, coordinating with the other teams became a nightmare as we had to contact base to get each team's location and assignment. Eventually, our team caught another team and borrowed one of their radios but the confusion and leaving one team essentially in the dark seemed a bit of poor form.
On the up side though, we had a nice hike and were not bombarded with a bunch of radio traffic. The good news too was that this area is well known and frequently traveled by both myself and my teammate so we were not too concerned about our location or progress moving up the 4 mile 3,500ft elevation gain mountain side.
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