so our ARES group finally got around to doing a full scale exercise last saturday and honestly it was a lot more humbling than i expected. we've been doing tabletop stuff for a couple years now but this was the first time we actually had people deployed at simulated EOC locations, a couple of us running portable HF, and a net control station that was supposed to coordinate everything.

the first thing that fell apart was message traffic. we were using ICS-213 forms and someone had printed the wrong version so the fields didnt match what net control was expecting. took like 20 minutes to sort out and in a real event that could matter. second thing was our simplex fallback plan — we'd agreed on a frequency but nobody had programmed it into their handhelds ahead of time so there was a lot of fumbling around.

the good stuff though: our HF link on 40m actually held up really well considering conditions, and one of the newer guys who'd never done anything like this before just kind of stepped up and became a really solid relay station. those moments are why we do this i think.

curious if other groups have done similar exercises and what lessons came out of them. especially interested in how people handle the message traffic piece because that seems to be where we keep falling down.

yeah the message traffic thing is a really common stumbling block, we had the exact same issue a few years back. what helped us a lot was doing a dedicated winlink drill separate from the voice stuff — just getting everyone comfortable with the format before you add the chaos of an actual exercise on top of it. also we started keeping laminated quick reference cards at every deployment position with the frequency plan, the fallback simplex channels, and the ICS form field explanations all on one page. sounds basic but it made a huge difference when people are stressed and trying to remember six things at once.

the thing about your newer guy stepping up doesn't surprise me at all honestly. sometimes the people who havent built up bad habits yet just adapt faster. we had a tech licensee who'd only been licensed like four months handle a traffic net better than some of our old timers during a real activation a couple winters ago. keep that guy engaged, those operators are valuable.

this is making me want to push our club to do something similar, we basically just talk about emcomm at meetings but ive never actually done a real drill. how did you coordinate getting everyone to show up and commit to a whole saturday? that seems like the hard part with volunteers