so i've been licensed for about 3 years now, mostly just do some ragchewing and the occasional net, but i finally joined our county ARES group back in the spring and last weekend was my first full simulated disaster exercise. they were doing a scenario where a major flood had knocked out most of the county's infrastructure and we had to relay health and welfare traffic between the EOC and a couple of the shelters they'd set up.

i thought i'd be fine, i mean i know how to operate, i've logged probably a couple hundred hours on air by now. but man there's something completely different about trying to pass formal NTS-style traffic when someone is basically timing you and the net control is running 8 stations at once. i fumbled my first message pretty bad, had the wrong precedence on it and forgot to say the station of origin clearly. net control was patient but you could tell they'd seen this before with newer emcomm guys.

the other thing that got me was the ICS stuff. like i understood in theory that you check in with the agency rep before you just start transmitting, but in the chaos of the drill i kind of just... keyed up. got a gentle correction on that too. lesson learned for sure.

anybody else have stories from their first exercises like this? or even from real deployments where stuff didn't go the way you expected? feel like there's a lot of tribal knowledge in this hobby that only comes out when people actually share the failures, not just the wins.

oh man this brings back memories. my first exercise was a complete mess and i had been an extra class for like 5 years at that point. knowing the rules and actually functioning under simulated stress are two totally different animals. the ICS thing tripped me up the same way you described -- in a real deployment the served agency people dont always know what we need either so it can be this weird dance of trying to be helpful without stepping on toes or going rogue on the radio.

one thing that helped me a lot was volunteering for net control during exercises instead of just being a field station. when you're the one trying to manage the net you really quickly figure out what makes a station easy to work with versus a nightmare. clear traffic, proper prowords, keeping your transmissions short and readable. after i did NCS a few times i became a much better field operator just from understanding what the other side of the mic is dealing with.

the message format stuff will click eventually. i'd recommend looking up some of the old ARRL radiogram practice stuff if you haven't already, even just drilling the format in your head so it becomes automatic helps a ton when you're nervous. the real disasters don't give you time to look anything up.

yeah first exercises are rough, don't beat yourself up. i remember showing up to a simulated shelter deployment a few years back thinking i had my go-bag dialed in and then realizing i'd forgotten a power cable for my HF rig. had to borrow one from somebody. now i have a laminated checklist taped inside the lid of my kit bag which feels dorky but honestly has saved me from being that guy again.

the tribal knowledge thing you mentioned is real and its kind of a problem in emcomm circles honestly. a lot of groups do the exercise, debrief for like 20 minutes, and then nobody writes anything down and the same mistakes show up again next year with the new people. the groups that actually improve are the ones that do a real after action review and keep records of what went wrong. our group started keeping a shared doc of lessons learned from every exercise and activation and it made a noticeable difference. not trying to make it sound like we have it all figured out because we definitely dont, but that one change helped.