so i've been licensed for about three years now and finally got around to joining our county ARES group earlier this year. they do these quarterly simulated emergency tests and i figured hey, how hard can it be, i talk on the radio all the time right

well. the drill was a simulated flooding scenario, EOC needed traffic relayed to a couple of shelter locations and we had maybe 6 operators spread out. the actual radio part was fine but what caught me completely off guard was how bad i was at the ICS paperwork side of things. like i knew ICS 100 from the online course but actually filling out an ICS 213 while also trying to copy traffic and not mess up the net was a whole different thing. i kept losing my place in the message and had to ask for fills twice which felt embarrassing even though everyone was super nice about it

also nobody told me the repeater we were supposed to use had a 100hz tone on it and i sat there for like 5 minutes wondering why nobody could hear me. minor thing but in a real event that kind of delay matters

anyway just wanted to share because i think a lot of people assume they're ready until they actually run a drill. anyone else have a story like this or tips for getting better at the message handling part specifically

oh man the ICS forms thing is so real. i've been doing emcomm stuff for probably 15 years and i still see experienced operators freeze up when they have to do written traffic under any kind of pressure. the thing that helped me most early on was just printing out a stack of blank 213s and practicing at home, like actually writing out fake messages start to finish until the format was completely automatic. sounds tedious but it works.

the repeater tone thing is classic too and honestly thats a planning failure more than a you failure. whoever set up the drill should have had a pre-drill checklist that included confirming everyone had the correct CTCSS programmed. we had almost the exact same issue during a SET a few years back, operator couldnt get into the machine for nearly ten minutes because he had the wrong tone from an old frequency list. after that our EC started requiring everyone to do a radio check on the designated freqs like 30 minutes before any activation. simple fix.

keep going to the drills though, seriously. the people who show up twice and think they've got it figured out are usually the ones who disappear when a real event happens. the ones who keep coming back and treating each drill like it actually matters are worth their weight in gold when things go sideways for real.

yeah asking for fills is nothing to be embarrassed about, thats literally what the procedure is there for. better to get the message right than to pass along garbage traffic that causes confusion at the EOC. ive heard stories of operators who were too proud to ask and the address on a welfare message came out completely wrong, not great

one thing that really helped our group was doing tabletop exercises before the actual radio drills, just sitting around and talking through scenarios so everyone knows their role before they're trying to do it live. some of the older elmers in our group are really good at running those and they're a lot less stressful than being on the air with a net control timing you