so we finally ran a full simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group, been planning it for like three months and i was honestly a little nervous going in because i was handling one of the net control positions for the first time. the scenario was a major flooding event cutting off two townships from normal communications infrastructure — cell towers assumed down, landlines out, the whole thing.

what i didnt expect was how fast things got confusing even in a fake scenario. we had operators at the EOC, a few at the hospital, one at the Red Cross shelter, and a handful of portable stations scattered around. and within maybe 20 minutes the net was kind of a mess. people were stepping on each other, someone kept forgetting to ID, and at one point we had two stations both trying to relay the same message to the EOC simultaneously.

the actual lesson i took away from it — and i feel dumb for not realizing this before — is that message traffic discipline matters SO much more under stress. like even in a fake emergency with people who know what theyre doing, things deteriorated pretty quickly without really firm net control. im curious if other groups have run exercises like this and what surprised them or what they changed afterward. we're already talking about doing a debrief next week but figured id ask here too.

yeah that chaos you're describing is pretty much universal in the first hour of any realistic exercise, at least in my experience. i've been doing ARES stuff for going on 15 years now and the single biggest thing our group changed after a rough exercise was standardizing how net control handles priority traffic versus routine traffic. we literally wrote a one-page laminated cheat sheet that net control operators keep at their station during any activation. sounds silly but it helped enormously.

the double-relaying problem is super common too. what helped us was designating specific relay stations ahead of time and having them check in during the preamble so everyone knows who's handling what path. and honestly — drilling the actual ICS message forms until people can fill them out half asleep. the fancy radio stuff is usually fine, its the paperwork and coordination layer where things fall apart. the debrief is probably going to be the most valuable thing you do, take good notes and dont let people get defensive about what went wrong, thats where the real learning happens.

this is really interesting to read, im a newer ham and just joined our local ARES group a couple months ago so haven't been through a full exercise yet. the part about people stepping on each other is something i've been wondering about — like in a real event how do you even know when the frequency is clear if everybodys trying to get through at once? is there a protocol for that or does net control just have to be really firm about it