so we finally did a proper simulated emergency exercise with our county ARES group and i honestly had no idea how much stuff would fall apart when you actually try to run real traffic under pressure. like i thought i knew the procedures but when the EC was throwing scenarios at us and people were calling in on different nets simultaneously it got messy fast.

the biggest thing i noticed was that people defaulted to just chatting on the repeater instead of actually passing formal NTS traffic. we had one guy who kept giving situation reports in plain english which honestly was fine for local stuff but we were supposed to be practicing the actual message format for when things get handed off up the chain. nobody wanted to slow down and do it right when things felt urgent even though it was just a drill.

we also had a net control operator who was genuinely excellent at keeping the frequency organized but the moment we simulated the repeater going down and switched everyone to simplex it was like herding cats. half the group couldnt even hear each other because nobody had really mapped out their simplex coverage beforehand. thats a huge gap we didnt know we had.

anyone else done exercises like this and found similar issues? what did your group do to actually fix the discipline around message handling because i feel like we keep drilling and the same bad habits come back every time

yeah this is really common and honestly if your first drill felt chaotic it probably means it was a good drill. the ones where everything goes smoothly usually just mean the scenario wasnt hard enough or people were cutting corners without anyone noticing.

the simplex coverage thing is a real problem for a lot of groups. we had the same issue years back and what actually helped was doing a dedicated simplex mapping day where we just drove around the county with HTs and made notes about who could hear who from where. took a saturday but we ended up with a rough coverage map that we actually laminated and put in the go kits. its not perfect but it gives people a starting point when the repeater is gone.

on the message format stuff -- i've found that people resist it because it feels slow and awkward and a little silly when you're standing next to someone in a parking lot. the trick is making sure everyone understands WHY the format exists, which is really about making sure the message survives getting relayed through three or four people without getting garbled. once operators get that part it tends to stick better. still takes repetition though, there's no shortcut really.

the repeater going down scenario gets people every time lol. we did something similar a few months back and i was net control when we switched to simplex and let me tell you it was humbling. i had stations calling in that i literally could not hear at all, had to rely on relays and i wasnt even sure who was relaying for who.

one thing our group started doing is assigning specific relay positions ahead of time based on geography, like this person is responsible for the eastern end of the county, this person covers the hilly area near the reservoir etc. it doesnt solve everything but at least when simplex goes sideways there's already a structure for who talks to who instead of everyone just yelling into the void hoping somebody hears them.