so our ARES group finally got around to doing a proper tabletop/radio exercise last saturday, been trying to organize this thing for like 6 months and we finally pulled it off. the scenario was a major bridge collapse cutting off one side of the county, no cell service, primary EOC needed welfare traffic and resource requests relayed from two staging areas about 12 miles apart.

honestly thought it would go smoother than it did. first thing that fell apart was everyone trying to talk at the same time on the simplex frequency — we had maybe 8 operators and nobody wanted to wait their turn, net control kept getting stepped on. the guy running net control was one of our more experienced guys too, so it wasnt a skill issue, just... chaos, which i guess is kind of the point of doing these exercises right.

the other thing that surprised me was how fast the ICS message forms slowed everything down. in a real keyboard-and-chair environment they make sense but out in the field with people handing you scribbled notes, translating that into proper ICS 213 format while also trying to relay on the radio took way longer than i expected. we ended up with a backlog of like 4-5 messages at one point.

anyway curious if anyone else has run similar exercises and what caught you off guard. feels like there's always something that humbles you when you do one of these for real.

yeah the net discipline thing is pretty much universal in my experience, doesnt matter how many times you brief people beforehand, put them in a simulated high-stress situation and suddenly everyone forgets to wait for a break in traffic. we had almost the exact same thing happen at a county exercise a couple years back, ended up having to implement a very strict 'only speak when net control calls you' protocol mid-exercise which felt clunky but actually helped a lot.

the ICS form thing is real too. what helped us was pre-printing a bunch of simplified relay templates that matched the 213 fields but had bigger boxes and plain english labels. still not perfect but it cut down the time considerably. also having a dedicated logging person separate from the radio operator at each station made a huge difference — trying to do both at once is a recipe for errors or missed traffic.

one thing that always catches our group off guard is battery management. everyone shows up with full batteries but by hour 4 of a realistic exercise people are scrambling. worth building that into your next sim if you haven't already.

this is really interesting to read, im still pretty new to the hobby and just started attending our local ARES meetings. haven't done a full exercise yet but this kind of thing makes me want to prepare more before my first one. do you guys practice with Winlink at all or is it mostly voice? i've seen some groups use it for formal traffic and it seems like it might help with the message backlog problem you described but i honestly dont know enough about how it all fits together in an actual deployment scenario.