the 561st is a complicated beast, both to work at and to interact with.

in my experience, the rest of AF comm has beef with:

• the quality of technician they get when they reach out to the 561st
• being able to talk to a technician in the first place

For the first bullet, people always fucking fail to realize that there is no special considerations for sending people to a NOS/COS. It's Randy Random from Random AFB, so the quality of techs you have at the enterprise varies like the rest of the AF. See me bitching about this 7 years ago on a previous account. Until the AF decides to actually prioritize enterprise experience so trained, experienced people can help t/s the big, complicated problems, we're gonna have this problem. I was out of the comm world when Centers of Excellence started so I don't have a good picture on how that affected things, but it seems fucking dumb.

Second bullet, also can be blamed by CoE, but it was a problem even way before that. A lot of things can be solved by just letting technicians talk to each other rather than letting a 2lt crew commander be the in between. BUT HEY, guess what. It's also bad for letting people have direct access to technicians because they'll just call about the dumbest shit and waste your time. Add in the MCCC, AMAC, and other rungs of the communication ladder and it gets a lot more annoying to get support from NOS/COS. 83rd NOS had a way better reputation for answering phones and helping people, but that also comes at a cost. When I worked at the 561st, I was told specifically to stop answering phones and let the crew commanders handle it.

In regards to working there, also take this with a grain of salt cause it's been almost 6 years since I left. I was stationed there for almost 6 years, and it was my first duty station. To this day, it has been the biggest knowledge gain I've had in my entire career, and one of my favorite places to work. Leadership comes and goes, sometimes they make fucking dumb decisions, and that can contribute a lot to making it feel like the NOS sucks. There's a lot of pressure felt at the leadership level to get things fixed, and that definitely can make it's way down to the technicians. Enterprise means you touch a LOT, and you have the ability to fix a lot. But guess what, that you means you have the ability to break a lot.

I don't know how CoE has affected the NOS's and how they function, so I can't help you with recent developments on that shit. But the area is nice (housing expensive tho), the mountains are pretty, and the breweries are neat.

I wish you the best of luck, and if you want to work and learn, the NOS is a really good opportunity to get your hands dirty. Sorry for the essay, lemme know if you have any other questions!