so we ran a simulated disaster exercise last saturday, basically a scenario where a category 3 hurricane had knocked out all infrastructure in the county and we were supposed to be the backup comms for the EOC and a couple of the shelter sites. been doing these for a few years now and honestly this one was kind of humbling.

the good stuff first — our net control handled traffic really smoothly, we got ICS 213 messages relayed back and forth without too many repeats, and the new guys we brought in actually did pretty solid work. one of them had only been licensed for like 6 months and he was copying traffic like he'd been doing it forever, that was genuinely cool to see.

the bad stuff — and this is where i want to hear if others have run into this — we had two operators who showed up without their go-bags having been updated since the last exercise. like one guy had a battery that hadnt been cycled in over a year and it browned out maybe 40 minutes in. another situation was we had a message that needed to get to the shelter on the south end and we just... had nobody positioned there. the geographic coverage gaps only showed up when we actually tried to do something real with the net.

also we realized nobody had actually tested the interface between our digital setup (winlink mostly) and the EOC's intake process. they didn't know how to receive the messages on their end even though we were sending them fine. that one's on us for not coordinating better beforehand.

anyway curious what lessons other groups have pulled out of similar exercises, especially around logistics and coordination gaps rather than just the radio stuff itself

yeah the battery thing is such a common problem and it always seems to surface at the worst time. we had almost the exact same situation during a winter storm exercise a couple years back. someone showed up with a sealed lead acid that looked fine externally but had basically no capacity left. now our group does a mandatory battery check night about 3 weeks before any scheduled exercise — nothing fancy, just everyone brings their stuff to the club meeting and we load test anything over 18 months old. its added maybe 45 minutes to one meeting a year and we havent had a battery fail in the field since.

the winlink/EOC coordination gap is a really good catch though. that's not something you can solve with better gear — it's a people and process problem and those are actually harder. we spent a whole separate session just walking the served agency folks through what a message looks like when it arrives, who clicks what, where it goes. took maybe 2 hours and made a huge difference. the EOC staff turnover is also a thing to watch because you can train someone and then they move on and the institutional knowledge walks out the door with them.

sounds like overall it was a worthwhile exercise though, the fact that you found those gaps in a drill and not an actual event is exactly the point

this is making me think about whether I should even be in the ARES group yet honestly. im only about 8 months into my general class and reading about go-bags and ICS forms and winlink interfaces kind of makes my head spin a little. like I have a baofeng and a used ic-7300 and I barely know how to do a proper net check-in without fumbling the phonetics.

is there a good way for newer people to participate in these drills without being a liability? i want to help but i also dont want to be the guy whose battery dies and messes up a relay chain or whatever