so we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated disaster exercise through our county ARES group and honestly it was kind of eye opening in ways i didn't totally expect. the scenario was a major flooding event that took out all the cell infrastructure in the eastern part of the county and we had to coordinate between the EOC, a couple of red cross shelters, and a field hospital site about 12 miles out.

i've been licensed for about 6 years now and done plenty of nets but this was different. everything that seemed easy in a regular net suddenly got complicated when you add in people who are stressed, messages that need to be relayed through two or three operators, and the fact that half the team hadn't worked together before. we had one guy at the EOC who kept going off frequency and nobody caught it for like 20 minutes. and the ICS forms thing... i thought i knew how to fill out an ICS-213 but under pressure i was second guessing myself the whole time.

the biggest thing i took away was that we really need more practice with message handling specifically. like actual radiogram traffic, not just check-ins. anyone else done exercises like this and have thoughts on what helped your group get better at the message passing stuff? we're trying to figure out what to focus on for the next one.

yeah the ICS forms thing trips up almost everybody the first time, dont feel bad. we ran a similar exercise about two years ago and honestly the forms were the least of our problems — it was the net control discipline that nearly fell apart. people want to be helpful so they start transmitting over each other and then net control loses the thread entirely.

what really helped us was doing shorter tabletop exercises in between the big ones. like just getting 5 or 6 people in a room with handhelds and running a 45 minute message passing drill with no fancy scenario, just here's a message, pass it to this station, get a receipt, log it. sounds boring but that muscle memory is what you fall back on when things get chaotic for real. we also started requiring everyone to do at least a few weeks on the local traffic net before they could participate in the exercises, which helped a lot with the radiogram format stuff.

the off-frequency thing is a real problem and its usually a radio that's been sitting in someone's car getting bumped. worth building a comms check protocol right at the start of any activation where everyone verifies they're actually where they think they are on the dial.

this is actually what got me interested in getting my general and doing more than just local repeater stuff. i went to one of these exercises as kind of an observer before i upgraded and watching the experienced operators handle all that pressure was honestly intimidating but also really cool to see.

i guess my question reading your post is how do you even get plugged into the ARES group in your area? i registered on the arrl site a while back but never really heard anything back from anyone locally. maybe i'm doing something wrong