so i finally participated in an actual simulated emergency exercise with our local ARES group after months of just attending meetings and reading about it. we ran a scenario where a major storm had knocked out all normal comms infrastructure and we were tasked with relaying health and welfare traffic between two EOCs and a shelter about 15 miles away.

honestly it was a bit of a wake up call. i thought i was pretty prepared — i have a decent go-kit, spare batteries, the whole thing — but when the net control started throwing curveball "injects" like hey your primary repeater just went down, figure it out, i kind of froze for a second. ended up fumbling around trying to remember my simplex frequencies while people were waiting on traffic from me. embarrassing but also really valuable i guess.

the biggest lesson i took away was that muscle memory matters way more than i thought. knowing your equipment under stress is a totally different thing from knowing it at your desk at home. we also had one station that couldnt get their winlink to cooperate and they spent like 20 minutes troubleshooting while everyone waited, which kind of highlighted how you need a backup for your backup.

anyway my question is — for those of you who do these drills regularly, how do you keep your skills sharp between exercises? do you just do lots of nets, or is there other stuff you practice on your own?

yeah that freeze moment you described is super common and honestly the whole point of doing the exercises in the first place. i remember my first real activation (not even a drill, actual flooding event) and i had practiced plenty but the moment the EC handed me a formal message to relay i blanked on the ICS-213 format for like a solid minute. not great when people are waiting.

what helped me most was honestly just doing weekly nets consistently. not just checking in, but volunteering for net control whenever i could. handling traffic on the NTS nets is also really good practice because you're dealing with formal message format under a little bit of time pressure. its not the same as a disaster scenario obviously but the reps add up.

the other thing i do is every few months i just go sit in my car with my go-kit and pretend i drove somewhere and need to set up from scratch. no wifi, no looking stuff up, just me and the radio. you find out real fast what you actually know versus what you think you know.

the winlink thing is so real, ive seen that happen at almost every drill i've been to. someone always has a Winlink issue and it eats up everyone's time. our group actually made a rule after one particularly rough exercise that you have to do a successful Winlink check-in the week before any activation or drill just to prove your setup is actually working. helped a lot.

for keeping sharp between drills — i dunno i kind of just stay active on the local nets and try to actually talk to people rather than just doing a quick check-in and disappearing. there's also some online simulated emergency exercises you can join remotely which are surprisingly useful for practicing message handling without needing everyone to physically show up somewhere.