so we ran a simulated disaster drill on saturday, county-level thing coordinated with the local emergency management office. i've been doing ARES stuff for about three years now and i thought i had a pretty good handle on how things would go but honestly this exercise showed me how wrong i was about a few things.

the scenario was a major flooding event that took out most of the repeater infrastructure in the south part of the county. we had to fall back to simplex way faster than anyone expected and i'll be honest, a lot of us were fumbling around trying to remember our pre-planned simplex frequencies. like we had them written down somewhere but nobody had actually practiced using them under simulated stress conditions before.

the other thing that got me was how bad our net control handoffs were. our primary NCS had to "go off the air" at the 45 minute mark per the scenario script and the backup took probably 3-4 minutes to get organized and take over. in a real event that gap could matter. we also had one guy show up with a radio that hadnt been programmed with the updated frequencies from like two months ago so he was basically useless for the first half hour while somebody helped him sort it out.

anyway im curious if anyone else has done these kinds of exercises and what surprised you the most when things didnt go the way you thought they would. i feel like i learn more from these drills than from any training session.

yeah the simplex fallback thing is real. we had almost the exact same issue in our section drill last spring. everyone is so used to hitting the repeater that when you take it away people kind of freeze up for a second. what we ended up doing after that was building a simplex net into our regular monthly training so operators actually get reps on it, not just as a backup plan on paper.

the NCS handoff problem is something i've seen at every level honestly. the fix that worked for us was having the backup NCS shadow the primary for like the first 20-30 minutes of any activation and actively log traffic, not just listen passively. that way when the handoff happens they already have situational awareness and its not a cold start. sounds obvious but we werent doing it before.

the out of date programming thing though... man that one stings because its so preventable. we actually made it a rule that anyone showing up to an activation has to check in with their call and confirm their radio config during the weekly net the sunday before any scheduled drill. if you cant do that you get a reminder call. not foolproof but it cut down on the frequency mismatch stuff a lot.

this is really interesting to read, im pretty new to ARES (just got my general a few months ago) and havent done a full drill yet. our EC mentioned theres one coming up in the fall and i signed up but i honestly dont know what to expect. reading your post makes me think i should probably practice more on simplex before then instead of just relying on the repeater all the time. do you think its worth doing some informal practice contacts on simplex just to get comfortable with the idea of how different it feels?