So we ran a county-wide simulated emergency exercise this past Saturday and honestly it was a bit of a mess but in a good way I think? The whole scenario was a major flooding event cutting off the eastern part of the county and we had to establish comms between the EOC and three shelter locations using only our go-kits since we assumed no repeater infrastructure.

First thing that fell apart was net control. Our designated NC got stuck in traffic and nobody had really been briefed on who the backup was supposed to be, so there was like 15 minutes of people just kind of calling on the frequency and nobody really taking charge. Eventually Dave W9DTK stepped up and did a great job but that gap was painful to watch. We talked about it in the debrief and decided every drill from now on needs at least two people who are briefed and ready to be NC.

The other thing that surprised me was battery life. I thought my setup was solid — 20Ah LiFePO4 running a 50W mobile — but I had it cranked up for most of the morning passing traffic and by noon I was sweating it. In a real event that shelter location needs power for way longer than a few hours. anybody else run into this kind of thing in their exercises? Curious what solutions people have landed on.

yeah the backup net control thing is such a classic drill failure and it happens almost every single time until a group gets burned by it enough. we had the exact same problem in our AUXCOMM exercise back in the spring, took us almost 20 minutes to sort out who was running the net and by that point in a real disaster you've already lost momentum and possibly lost contact with people who needed help.

what we do now is we actually have a written activation order posted in the group's shared drive and everyone who might serve as NC has a printed copy in their go-kit. sounds overly formal but when things are chaotic you really want someone to be able to just look at a piece of paper and say ok it's me, I'm running this. the other thing that helped us a lot was running shorter more frequent tabletop exercises in between the big drills so people stay sharp on the protocols without having to wait for the once-a-year county event.

on the battery front — I switched to running my HF rig at 25W for most traffic passing situations and honestly the signal reports didn't suffer much at the distances we're working. cuts consumption significantly. also started keeping a second battery in the kit specifically as a reserve, dont touch it unless the primary drops below 30 percent or whatever.

this is actually really helpful to read, im fairly new to ARES and havent been through a full exercise yet. our group has one coming up in about 6 weeks and reading stuff like this makes me want to make sure my go-kit is actually ready and not just sort of thrown together. I think my battery situation is probably not great if im being honest with myself.

one question — how does the traffic passing actually work in these drills, like is it real message traffic with the standard ICS-213 forms or do they kind of make up simplified stuff for the exercise? I've read about Winlink and also just voice nets and im not sure what most groups actually use in practice.