Eroak

SOP (Radio) - The Contact Report

What is a Contact Report?
All military units are trained to use a standard NATO form of radio procedure for reporting encounters with enemy forces. The reason for standardizing the format of for contact reporting, is to minimize extraneous radio traffic by creating a clear and concise common approach. Therefore, everyone listening on the radio net understands exactly the nature and scope of the enemy threat. In our virtual BF2142 world we don’t use actual military radios, but with VoIP, virtually the same methodology can be utilized.

The form of the Contact Report answers the following questions:

1. Who is sending the report?
2. Where are the enemy?
3. What is their estimated strength, type and armament.
4. What appears to be their intentions and/or direction of travel.
5. What are you doing about them?
6. What are your recommendations?

Communication Rose
The Battlefield 2142 game offers a feature by which a player may identify an enemy using the communication rose. By using this feature, the first four questions listed above are answered, relayed to your squad and represented on your squad's map / mini-map. This method keeps VoIP chatter to a minimum.

Using the comm rose should be the first step to providing a Contact Report.

The player providing this Contact Report should follow up over VoIP with any action the plan to take or any recommendations on actions. The squad leader should respond with an affirmative or negative.

In the case where using the comm rose is ineffective or too burdensome to use (due to the number of enemy units), then the player should use the VoIP feature to make the report. This report should remain short and to the point to keep the VoIP chatter to a minimum.

Affirmative & Negative Hotkeys
The Battlefield 2142 game provides a key bind to respond in the affirmative and negative. The default bind for the affirmative is the PgUp key. The default bind for the negative is the PgDown key.

Why have a Contact Report?
How many times has everyone heard the following type of conversation over VoIP?

Unknown voice over VoIP says: "uhhh....there's some guys in the woods over there... uhhhh... they're coming this way now .... uhhh... I don't think they see me yet... uhhhh ... should I shoot them?"

.......then silence, followed by a message on your own computer screen saying "Rabbit is down"

Obviously, there's a lot of missing information about the enemy threat, such as .... who was the friendly call sign that engaged, what type of enemy, where are they, what appears to be their intentions and what are you doing about it? The rest of the squad / fire team are left in the dark to draw their own conclusions as to the impact on the mission and what they should do next. All in all, this is not a workable solution for any real life special forces team.

Example
An example of VoIP Contact Reports under condition RED (see SOP (Tactics) - Fire Discipline for more information on RED / YELLOW / GREEN rules of engagement.)

Squad Member: "Squad Leader, this is Badger, CONTACT, north, three infantry and one ACP, moving south east, engaging."
Squad Leader: "Team, this is Squad Leader! DISPERSE! Go GREEN!"
Squad Member: Badger responds by hitting the affirmative hotkey.

Additional Notes
Contact Reports can be abused and over used. They're most useful in a situation where various fire teams / squads are geographically separated performing individual mission tasks. If the entire fire team is geographically on the same ground and everyone sees the same threat, often it's redundant to send a Contact Report, except if you believe that other team members can't see the actual threat. Therefore, information such as Compass Direction and possible enemy intentions might prove useful. The key is to use one's own best judgment. It should be noted that due to the higher command structure above the fire team & squad, then even if the team were all together, the Squad Leader would send a proper radio Contact Report to the Commander.

For obvious mission critical reasons, Contact Reports are classified as Priority radio transmissions. In other words, when you hear the operative word Contact over VoIP, the entire radio net should go quiet and listen for the reporting call sign to send his information. Often in real life Contact Reports, one hears the phrase "Leader, this is Badger, CONTACT... Wait ... Out". It usually causes the radio net to go silent waiting for the sending call sign to come back on the air and send the full report. It's a good way of getting the net cleared while the sender examines his maps (checking Compass Direction) and prepares to send full report.

After a bit of practice using this technique, it becomes almost second nature and makes it much easier to communicate enemy threats, providing the fire team / squad leader better command and control capability, plus improving the overall SA (situational awareness) of the entire fire team / squad. We would encourage all players on any Tactical Gamer BF2 server, to utilize this standard NATO SOP methodology for Contact Reports as much as possible.

__________________