so we finally got enough people together to run a proper simulated emergency scenario through our county ARES group and honestly it was kind of eye opening. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out the repeater infrastructure and we had to coordinate shelter-to-shelter traffic using simplex and some winlink on HF. i've been licensed about 6 years and thought i had a pretty good handle on things but man, when you actually try to pass formal message traffic under simulated stress it's a different animal.

biggest thing i noticed is how much time gets wasted when operators aren't sure of their net control procedures. we had two people try to call in at the same time on the same frequency for like a solid minute because nobody had really internalized when to wait and when to just go. and the ICS forms stuff — i know everyone groans about paperwork but when the served agency rep asked for a resource status update we kind of fumbled around for way too long before someone had the right form filled out.

also learned that my go-bag setup was way overconfident. thought i had enough battery but running the HF rig plus the VHF handie plus trying to keep my laptop going for winlink — drained faster than i expected. going to rethink the power budget before the next one. anyone else run similar drills lately? curious what caught you off guard.

yeah the battery thing gets everyone the first time, no shame in it. i've been doing emcomm stuff for probably 15 years now and i still see experienced guys show up to activations with power setups that look great on paper and then reality happens. cold weather especially will just destroy your capacity estimates if you did your math at room temp.

the net control discipline issue you mentioned is real and honestly its mostly a training problem not a people problem. most hams just dont practice formal net procedures in their day to day operating so when a drill rolls around the muscle memory isnt there. our group started doing a quick 30 minute tabletop before every actual exercise just to walk through the protocols verbally and it helped a lot. even just reading through the net script out loud as a group before keying up made a noticeable difference.

the ICS form thing is a whole other rabbit hole but if you're interfacing with served agencies it really is worth the pain of learning it. they dont care about our radio stuff, they care about the information being in a format they can plug into their own systems. took me a while to accept that but its true.

this is making me want to actually participate in one of these, ive been putting it off because i always figure my general class ticket and a couple handhelds probably wont be that useful but reading stuff like this makes me think even just showing up and learning the process would be worth it. do most ARES groups welcome people who are still pretty new or is it more of a experienced operators only situation