so we ran a simulated emergency exercise this past saturday, countywide thing coordinated with the local ARES group and a few served agencies. i've been licensed about 12 years now and done maybe a dozen of these but this one hit different for some reason.

the scenario was a prolonged power outage combined with a hospital needing health-and-welfare traffic routed because their normal comms were down. sounds straightforward right? well we had three net control operators rotate through and by hour two the logs were a mess. people were using inconsistent message formats, someone was sending ICS-213s but filling them out slightly differently than what our served agency expected, and we had one operator who kept jumping frequency without announcing it which caused a lot of confusion.

the thing that really got me was how fast things degraded when we threw in the curveball — we simulated a repeater going down and had to go simplex. half the team either didnt know the backup simplex frequency or their radios weren't programmed for it. we'd talked about this in meetings but clearly talking about it and actually doing it are two different things.

anyway i guess my question or maybe just the conversation starter is — what lessons have you guys pulled from your own exercises or real events? especially around message handling and keeping nets organized when things go sideways. feels like this is an area where most groups still have a lot of room to grow including mine.

yeah the simplex fallback thing is such a common gap it's almost a cliche at this point but it keeps biting groups anyway. we had basically the same issue during a real activation a couple years back, not a drill, actual flooding in our county. repeater stayed up thankfully but we had two operators show up with HTs that were only programmed for like five channels and none of them matched what we needed for the tactical net.

after that our EC basically mandated a standard template everyone had to load before any activation and we test it at least twice a year now by literally keying up on the simplex frequency and confirming coverage from key locations. sounds tedious but it shaved so much confusion out of the next drill.

the message format thing is harder to fix honestly. ICS-213 handling is one of those things where muscle memory only comes from repetition and most people just dont get enough reps. some groups do monthly traffic nets specifically so people stay sharp on that piece. might be worth suggesting to your EC if you're not already doing something like that.

this is really interesting to read, im still fairly new and just joined our local ARES group a few months ago so i havent been through a full exercise yet. my first one is coming up in the spring i think. kind of nervous about the message handling stuff because i've been reading about it but haven't actually done it for real under any kind of pressure.

is there a good way to practice that on your own or does it really just have to be with the group? i've been on the local traffic net a few times but those feel pretty low stakes compared to what you're describing.