so we ran a simulated disaster comms exercise last saturday with our local ARES group and honestly i wasnt prepared for how much went sideways even in a fake scenario. the whole premise was a major flood had knocked out all repeaters in the county and we had to coordinate shelter locations and resource requests using only simplex HF and VHF direct. sounded simple enough on paper.

what we figured out pretty quick was that nobody had agreed on a common simplex frequency ahead of time and half the guys showed up defaulting to different calling frequencies. one operator was running an IC-7300 with a portable dipole and was hearing everyone fine but nobody could hear him because his antenna situation was just not working out. another guy's go-bag radio had a dead battery because he hadnt checked it in like 8 months. small stuff but it really adds up when you're simulating an actual emergency.

the lesson i personally took away is that our net control training is way weaker than we thought. whoever was running net control that day — and i wont name names — kept acknowledging stations out of order and we ended up with like three people transmitting at the same time for a solid five minutes. just chaos. we do these drills and we think we're prepared and then you find out you're really not.

curious if anyone else has done exercises like this, tabletop or actual field stuff, and what kind of things caught you off guard. feels like every drill teaches you something you couldnt have guessed before you did it.

yeah the battery thing gets people every single time and yet somehow it keeps happening. we had the exact same problem at a RACES drill a couple years back — guy shows up with a Yaesu FT-60 that hasnt been charged since the previous exercise and spends the first 20 minutes of the drill just standing there. we actually made a rule after that where every member has to check in at the monthly meeting and confirm their go-bag gear is charged and ready, kind of like a verbal checklist thing. it helped a little but you still get the occasional person who forgot.

the net control issue is real too. we started doing dedicated NCS training sessions separate from the actual exercises and that made a pretty big difference. just running a practice net on a quiet evening where the only goal is for the NCS to practice traffic handling, prioritization, that kind of thing. nothing fancy but it builds the muscle memory. your point about simplex frequency coordination is a good one — we have ours written into our local ARES plan document but honestly i bet half the guys couldnt tell you what it is without looking it up.

this is the kind of stuff I wish someone had told me before I got involved with our local group. I just got my general a few months ago and joined ARES thinking it would mostly be about the radio stuff but theres so much more to it than that. like the coordination and procedures and knowing who talks to who. do you think its worth it for a newer guy to try to take on a net control role in a drill just to get the experience, or is that the kind of thing you should wait on until you've been around longer? asking genuinely because i dont want to be the person who makes the drill go sideways but i also feel like i wont learn if i never try.