so we finally pulled off our county ARES simulated emergency test last saturday and honestly it was a mixed bag but in a good way if that makes sense. we had about 14 operators show up which was better turnout than i expected, set up a net control at the EOC and had check-ins from three shelter locations plus a couple mobile units running around doing health and welfare traffic.

the big lessons for us — and i know this sounds obvious in hindsight — was that nobody had practiced actual formal message traffic in forever. like people know their callsigns and can ragchew all day but when we started passing ICS-213 style messages through the net it got real slow real fast. one of our guys who's been licensed since the 80s said the same thing happened in his section during a real activation after a tornado, everyone froze up a little on formal procedures because day to day we just dont do it.

we also had a net control handoff that got kind of ugly because the relief operator wasnt sure where we were in the log. something as simple as keeping a shared whiteboard or even just reading the net status out loud before handing off would've fixed that.

anyway wondering if other groups have found specific drills or exercises that help people stay sharp on message handling without making it feel like homework. we want to do monthly stuff but dont want people to stop showing up because its boring.

yeah the message traffic thing is so real, same exact problem we had when I joined our local group a few years back. what ended up working for us was doing a short 20-30 minute net on a weeknight, nothing fancy, just passing a couple of NTS-style messages around and then debriefing what went wrong. kept it low stakes and people actually started looking forward to it because the screwups were funny and you learned something.

the handoff issue though — we fixed that by having the incoming NCS do a full read-back of active stations and any pending traffic before the outgoing NCS goes QRT. takes like two minutes and its saved us from confusion more than once. also helps to have someone shadow NCS during a real exercise before they do it solo, even experienced operators get flustered when theres actual simulated urgency going on.

sounds like a solid first drill honestly, 14 operators showing up is nothing to sneeze at. a lot of groups struggle to get half that.

ive been lurking on this forum for a while and just got my general last spring so take this for what its worth but our EC has us do something he calls a traffic relay ladder every couple months where each person in the chain only hears the message once and has to pass it on accurately. its kind of like telephone but with actual radiogram format. even as a newer ham it made me realize how much you can lose if someones not writing things down carefully or asks for fills at the wrong time. might be worth trying if you want something that feels more like a game than a drill