so we ran a full scale simulated disaster exercise saturday — county EOC activated, the whole thing, about 14 operators across 3 sites plus a couple of mobile units. i've done these before but this one felt different because we actually had the served agency people there and they were asking real questions instead of just signing off on paperwork and going home.

biggest thing i noticed was how fast things fell apart when we simulated the repeater going down. we had a backup frequency plan but honestly like half the guys either hadn't memorized it or couldn't find it in the moment. and im not pointing fingers because i fumbled around with my notes too before i remembered where we were supposed to go. also our net control guy was fantastic but when he had to step away briefly for like 10 minutes nobody had clearly been designated as backup and it got awkward on the air real fast.

anyway i guess im just curious if other groups have found good ways to make sure operators actually internalize the backup plans instead of just having them written down somewhere. laminated cards? pre-programmed channels with agreed upon names? our group is talking about doing a shorter tabletop before the next full exercise to address some of this stuff. anyone done something similar?

yeah the repeater going down thing catches everyone off guard even when they know it's coming in an exercise, which is kind of the whole point right. our group went through something similar a few years back and what actually helped was we started doing a short 20 minute simplex-only net every month, nothing fancy just check ins and passing a short message, so people are comfortable operating that way before they need to do it under stress.

the laminated card idea is solid by the way, we have them and they do get used. but honestly the bigger thing for us was just making sure every single operator had the backup freqs programmed in their radio with a consistent naming scheme before any exercise. our EC basically made it a requirement and it cut down on a lot of confusion. the tabletop idea before a full exercise is really worth doing too, we found it surfaces a lot of procedural gaps that you dont want to discover when the served agency is watching.

this is actually really helpful to read, im fairly new to ARES and havent been through a full exercise yet, just a couple of the smaller nets. the part about nobody knowing who the backup net control was is something i wouldnt have even thought about as a potential problem. im gonna ask our EC about how that's handled before the next one we do.