so i finally participated in a full simulated emergency exercise with our local ARES group and i honestly had no idea how different it is from just working the radio in your shack. we were doing a simulated flood scenario where the county EOC lost all normal comms and we had to stand up a net and pass welfare traffic for about 3 hours with changing conditions thrown at us by the exercise coordinators.

first thing that humbled me was my go-bag. i thought i had everything dialed in but like 20 minutes in i realized i had forgotten a way to actually mount my HT antenna properly so i was just kind of holding it up with one hand while trying to write with the other. and the logging, oh man, dont even get me started. i was using paper logs and my handwriting under stress is apparently terrible, the net control could barely read what i was sending back.

the experienced guys made it look so easy. one of the elmers in our group was running a mobile rig off a small battery bank and he had this whole system for organizing message forms that i want to steal for myself. anyone else have stories from drills or real deployments where something unexpected taught you a lesson? im trying to build a better system before the next exercise in the fall.

yeah the antenna thing gets everybody at least once. i did my first deployment during a real winter storm a few years back and brought everything except a way to actually power my radio for more than two hours, had a great battery but the wrong connector. now i have a whole checklist laminated on the inside of my go bag lid, feels a little obsessive but it saved me twice already.

the logging piece is huge too. a lot of groups have moved to winlink or some kind of digital logging for exactly that reason but you still need to be ready when the laptop dies or the wifi is gone or whatever. i actually practiced writing ICS-213 forms with my non-dominant hand once just to see if i could do it under stress, spoiler: barely. the drills are honestly where you learn way more than any licensing exam could ever teach you about what actually matters when things go sideways.

this is really good to read actually, im about to do my first tabletop exercise next month and was feeling pretty confident about my setup but now im second guessing my antenna situation haha. how long did the whole exercise run? and did they give you any kind of debrief afterward where they went over what went wrong for people?