so we finally got enough people together to do a proper tabletop-turned-actual drill for our county ARES group and honestly it was way more humbling than i expected. we ran a scenario where the EOC had lost all commercial power and landlines and we had to establish comms between the EOC, three shelters, and the hospital. sounds simple on paper right

the first thing that fell apart was just knowing who was supposed to be where. we had a net control at the EOC but two people showed up at the wrong shelter and one guy didnt even know there was a drill happening because the email went to his spam. so right off the bat we had gaps in coverage we didnt plan for.

second thing — and this one really stung — was that our backup power situation at the EOC wasnt actually tested before the drill. the generator kicked on fine but the radio connected to it had a grounding issue that was causing all kinds of noise and our net control could barely copy anything from the shelters on 2m. we ended up switching to a handheld which worked but that shouldnt have been the solution ya know

overall though i think it was really valuable. we learned more in 4 hours than we had in months of just talking about emcomm at meetings. anyone else done something similar recently? curious what scenarios other groups are using and what caught you off guard

yeah this is pretty much exactly why drills matter and why so many groups put them off for too long. the email to spam thing is almost a universal problem — we had the same issue and eventually just started a group text thread for anything drill or activation related. not elegant but it works.

the grounding noise problem on generator power is something we ran into too, took us an embarrassingly long time to figure out what was going on. ended up being a ground loop with the way everything was connected. after that we made a laminated checklist specifically for generator hookup that lives in the go kit. boring solution but we havent had that problem since.

one thing that really changed how we do our drills was adding a "stress factor" — basically the EC throws in a curveball mid-drill like hey the shelter at the high school just reported they're overflowing and need to open the secondary site, can you get comms there in 20 minutes. it exposes assumptions real fast. your group sounds like they're on the right track though, honestly the groups that never drill are the scary ones

this is really interesting to read as someone who just got their ticket a few months ago and has been trying to figure out if ARES is something i want to get involved with. i guess i always assumed the experienced operators had all this stuff figured out already. kind of reassuring in a weird way that even established groups run into basic logistical problems

what license class do most of the people in your drills have? i'm still general and wasnt sure if that limits what i could do in an actual activation