so our ARES group finally did a full simulated exercise last saturday, kind of a tabletop turned into an actual go situation where we pretended the EOC had lost all normal comms and we had to relay health-and-welfare traffic plus resource requests between three different served agencies. i volunteered to be one of the net control stations which sounded fine in my head but man it got chaotic fast.

the thing nobody really warned me about was how much message traffic piles up when you have people who dont really know ICS form 213 format trying to pass messages over the air. we had a couple folks who kept wanting to give long verbal explanations instead of the actual formatted message and i wasnt sure when to cut them off or ask them to reformat vs just deal with it and move on to keep the net flowing. ended up with a backlog within like 20 minutes.

also our backup frequency plan had never actually been tested and when we tried to switch to the secondary after simulating a repeater failure, two of our field operators didnt have it programmed in. just a thing that seems obvious in hindsight but when youre doing live ops that kind of gap really stands out.

anyway curious if others have run into similar stuff, especially the message formatting issue. do you just practice the forms more beforehand or is there a better way to run NCS when traffic is heavy and not everyone knows what theyre doing

oh man the 213 form thing is so real. we had the exact same problem at our county exercise two years ago and honestly it came down to not enough pre-exercise training rather than anything wrong with how the nets were run. what helped us was doing a separate mini-session a few weeks before the main exercise specifically just on passing formal traffic — like we practiced until it was muscle memory. boring but it made a huge difference when the actual sim happened.

for NCS when things are piling up, something our EC taught me was to not be afraid to just hold traffic and tell stations to standby. people get anxious about dead air during exercises but its actually better to slow down and stay organized than to let the net turn into a free-for-all. easier said than done in the moment though, i get it. the first time i ran NCS during a busy exercise my log was a disaster.

the unprogrammed frequency thing is a rite of passage honestly. now our group sends out a radio check list two days before any exercise and people have to confirm they have all the freqs loaded. we still get one or two who miss something but its much better than it was.

yeah this has been bugging me for a while too, not the NCS part specifically but just the whole gap between what people think they know and what actually happens under pressure. i went through a real activation a couple years back (ice storm, county roads were closed for days) and the thing that surprised me most wasnt the radio stuff — it was just how tired everyone got and how decision quality kind of falls off after hour six or seven. like we had perfectly capable operators making weird errors they wouldnt make on a normal day.

idk if theres a clean fix for that but i think doing exercises that run longer than a couple hours is underrated. most sims i see are like a 2-3 hour thing on a saturday morning when everyone is fresh and motivated. not really the same as a real event where youre wet and its 2am and you havent eaten properly. just my two cents from that experience, not trying to derail the message format discussion which is also totally valid