so we finally did our county ARES simplex drill saturday and honestly it was a pretty eye opening experience. the scenario was a major flood event cutting off the EOC from several outlying shelters and we were supposed to relay traffic between them using only VHF simplex since the repeater infrastructure was assumed down.

first thing that surprised me was how fast things got chaotic even in a fake scenario. people were transmitting over each other, some guys forgot net discipline entirely and were just chatting on frequency like it was a ragchew, and our net control guy (who is normally super sharp) completely lost track of which shelters had checked in and which hadnt. we had like 8 stations trying to pass formal traffic and nobody had really practiced written message handling in probably a year.

the simplex coverage was also way worse than we expected. two of the shelter sites just couldnt hit net control at all, even with a decent antenna. we ended up having to designate a relay station kind of on the fly and that worked but nobody had really planned for it ahead of time.

the good news is everyone was a great sport about it and we debriefed for about an hour afterward which was honestly more valuable than the drill itself. curious if others have done similar exercises and what surprised you or what you changed after the fact. we're thinking about doing these quarterly now instead of just once a year.

yeah the simplex coverage thing catches everybody off guard the first time. people assume because the repeater hits everywhere that simplex will too and its just not how it works at all. we had the same rude awakening during a drill a few years back — one of our key sites was basically a dead zone and we'd never noticed because we always used the machine.

what helped us a lot was doing a dedicated simplex coverage mapping exercise before the next drill. just drove around to all the potential shelter and EOC sites with a HT and a mobile and actually tested propagation. took a saturday morning but now we have a pretty solid picture of where we need relays and we even pre-designated two or three relay positions so next time its not improvised. the net control tracking issue is real too, some folks swear by a simple paper log with checkboxes for each station, low tech but it actually works under pressure way better than trying to keep it all in your head.

this sounds a lot like the drill we did a couple years ago lol. the over-talking was our biggest problem too. i think people just panic a little even when they know its fake and forget everything they know about proper procedure. one thing our group started doing was requiring everyone to actually review ICS-213 message format before drills and we designated one person per shelter as the only one allowed to key up unless it was a genuine emergency within the scenario. cut the chaos down a lot. also honestly the debrief thing is huge, i feel like thats where the real learning happens and a lot of groups just skip it or do five minutes and call it done.