so we finally got around to doing a proper tabletop sim with the local ARES group, been trying to schedule this thing for like four months and kept getting pushed back. anyway the scenario was a prolonged power outage hitting three counties, maybe five to seven days, with cell and landline infrastructure knocked out. we had about eleven people show up which was honestly better turnout than i expected.

what really surprised me — and kind of embarrassed me if im being honest — was how fast things fell apart in the first simulated hour just from people not knowing who was supposed to be doing what. we had two people both trying to be net control at the same time and nobody had a clear picture of which repeaters were actually on backup power and which ones werent. we thought we had all that documented but the documentation was out of date by like two years.

the other big thing that came up was HF fallback. most of the newer members have their tickets but dont really operate HF regularly, so when we got to the part of the exercise where we pretended the repeaters were down, there was this kind of awkward silence. good learning moment though. we're talking about doing a follow up exercise that's strictly HF simplex just to shake out the rust.

curious if anyone else has run exercises like this and what scenarios caught your group off guard. always good to learn from other peoples mistakes before they become your real ones.

yeah the documentation thing gets everyone, doesnt matter how organized you think you are. we did a similar drill about two years back after a bad ice storm actually knocked out our main repeater and we realized our backup frequencies list had a typo in one of the PL tones. just one digit off but that was enough to cause confusion for a solid twenty minutes while people figured out why they couldnt get into the machine.

the dual net control problem is super common with groups that dont drill often enough. what helped us was doing a quick ICS briefing — even just fifteen minutes before the exercise starts — where you physically hand someone a piece of paper that says YOU are net control. sounds silly but it removes that hesitation. people are weirdly reluctant to step on each other even in a sim.

the HF gap with newer hams is real and its only getting worse as more people come in through the Technician path and never really touch HF. we started doing a monthly informal HF net on 40m just to keep people comfortable with the mode. nothing fancy, just check-ins and a little traffic practice. helped a lot with confidence when it actually mattered.

this is really good to read actually, im fairly new to ARES (just joined a few months ago) and honestly hadnt thought much about the HF fallback side of things. i have my general class but my HF setup at home is pretty basic and i dont use it a ton. kind of motivates me to actually get on the air more regularly instead of just having the gear sit there.

what software or tools were you using to track things during the sim? i've heard some groups use ICS forms and others use stuff like Winlink or even just paper logs. wondering what worked and what felt clunky.