so we ran a county-wide simulated emergency exercise last saturday and honestly it was a really good learning experience even though parts of it were kind of a mess. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out all the repeaters in the southern part of the county and we had to route traffic through a linked system about 40 miles north.

the thing that really surprised me — and not in a good way — was how many of our operators just froze up when the net control went down unexpectedly. we intentionally pulled the plug on the primary NCS about 45 minutes in to see if anybody would step up and take over. there was like a solid two minutes of dead air before someone finally announced themselves as alternate NCS. two minutes sounds short but in an actual disaster that could be really bad.

also our winlink guys did great actually, got several health and welfare messages through when voice was too congested. that part im genuinely proud of. but we had three people show up with radios that hadnt been checked in months, one HT had a dead battery right out of the gate which... yeah. the basics man.

anyway curious if other groups have dealt with the NCS succession issue and how you train for it. do you just randomly designate someone mid-exercise or do you have a more formal backup structure?

yeah the NCS handoff thing is such a common problem and honestly I think a lot of groups just assume it'll work itself out in the moment. it won't. we had the exact same issue in our group a couple years back and what ended up helping us was something pretty simple — we started doing what we called a silent NCS drill where we'd have a second person monitoring the whole net but not saying anything, and their job was specifically to count to 30 and then take over if the primary went quiet. having that mental assignment ahead of time made a huge difference. now we rotate who holds that backup role so everyone has done it at least once.

the dead battery thing though... I mean I get it, life gets busy, people forget. we started doing a quick radio check the week before any exercise, just a brief net where everyone checks in with a signal report and confirms their gear is operational. weeds out the problems before they become problems on the day.

sounds like overall you got some really useful data out of it though. the winlink piece working well is worth celebrating, that stuff takes a lot of practice to get smooth under pressure.

this is really interesting to read as someone who just got their ticket a few months ago and hasnt done any ARES stuff yet. im kind of intimidated by the whole thing honestly but reading that even experienced operators had a two minute gap makes me feel like maybe I wouldnt be totally useless if I showed up to one of these. does your group do any kind of orientation for new people before throwing them into a drill or is it mostly just learn by doing?