so i finally participated in one of those full-scale simulated disaster exercises our county ARES group puts on and wow i was not prepared for how different it feels versus just practicing nets at home. we had a scenario where a major flood had knocked out all repeaters and we had to coordinate with the EOC using only simplex and some HF. on paper it sounds simple but when youre actually in the middle of it and people are throwing traffic at you faster than you can log it, things get chaotic real quick.

a few things i noticed right away — my logging was a complete mess. i was trying to use my laptop but the scenario had us assume no internet so i switched to paper mid-exercise and my handwriting was basically illegible under stress. the other thing that got me was how bad i was at prioritizing traffic. like i know the theory, life safety first, welfare traffic second, etc, but when someone hands you a stack of messages and someone else is calling you on the radio at the same time it just falls apart a little.

the experienced operators made it look so easy and watching them helped a lot honestly. one of the elmers in our group kept reminding me to slow down on the mic and just breathe, which sounds obvious but i really needed to hear it. anyway curious if anyone else has been through these kinds of exercises and what surprised you the most the first time around

yeah that logging thing gets everybody. i remember my first real exercise maybe 8 years ago now and i basically had to throw out half my log because i couldnt read my own notes later. what ended up helping me was practicing ICS 214 forms at home just filling them out while watching tv or something, gets the muscle memory going so when youre stressed its not so foreign. also dont underestimate how important it is to have a designated net control who can actually pace the traffic — if NCS is calm the whole net calms down, and if NCS is rattled everybody panics.

the simplex coordination piece is genuinely hard especially in hilly terrain. we had one exercise where half the stations couldnt hear each other at all on our designated simplex frequency and we had to improvise relay stations on the fly. that was actually a great learning moment though because it forced people to problem solve in real time instead of just following a script.

oh man i feel this post. im still pretty new to all this emcomm stuff and our group did a tabletop exercise (not even a full deployment sim) and i still got confused about when to use formal message format versus just passing info verbally. there seems to be a lot of nuance that you only really get from doing it over and over. did your group debrief afterward? ours does a whole after action review and honestly thats where i learn the most, people are pretty honest about what went wrong