so we finally got our local ARES group to do a proper tabletop exercise after talking about it for like two years. had maybe 14 people show up which was better than expected honestly. the scenario was a major flooding event cutting off three towns from normal comms infrastructure — cell towers down, roads washed out, the whole deal.

what surprised me the most was how fast things fell apart on paper even before we simulated anything going wrong with our own gear. like we spent the first 20 minutes just figuring out who was supposed to call who and nobody had a current phone list that matched who was actually in the room. thats something i never would have thought to test beforehand.

we also discovered that two of our guys had never actually set up their go-kits under any kind of time pressure and one of them realized mid-exercise that he didnt know his HT's memory channels were all wrong for our county repeaters. been meaning to post about this for a while because i think a lot of groups skip this stuff and just assume everyone knows what they're doing when they show up.

anyway has anyone else done tabletop stuff recently and found things that surprised them? especially curious if other groups have figured out a good way to simulate realistic message traffic without it feeling too fake

yeah the contact list thing bites almost every group the first time they actually test it. we had the same issue a few years back during a windstorm exercise — our net control had a printed roster from eight months prior and three of those people had moved or upgraded their license and changed callsigns. not a huge deal in a drill but in a real event that kind of confusion adds up fast.

what ended up helping us was assigning one person specifically to be the roster keeper and making it their job to send out a check-in email every 90 days asking everyone to confirm their info and primary frequency. sounds simple but somebody has to own it or it just doesnt happen.

on the message traffic question — we use ICS-213 forms and have someone play the role of an EOC liaison feeding us realistic requests. stuff like 'we need a health and welfare check on this address' or 'the shelter at the high school needs to report their current capacity.' it keeps people focused and feels less like a classroom exercise. not perfect but way better than just making stuff up on the fly

this is really cool to read about, im still pretty new and just joined an ARES group a couple months ago. havent been to a real activation or exercise yet but they mentioned doing something like this in the fall. i didnt realize so much of it was about coordination and paperwork honestly i thought it was mostly just radio stuff. now im a little nervous that i dont know the ICS forms at all, is that something i should study before showing up or do they usually walk you through it