so we ran a simulated disaster exercise last Saturday, county-wide thing coordinated with the local ARES group and the OEM office. the scenario was a major ice storm taking out power and cell infrastructure across the northern part of the county for 72+ hours. i've done a few of these before but this one felt a lot more realistic than past drills and honestly it exposed some stuff i wasn't expecting.

biggest thing for me personally was how fast my Go Kit battery situation fell apart on paper. i thought i had like 18 hours of runtime figured out but once we actually started simulating continuous net operations with the FT-891 running at 50w for several hours... yeah that math changed pretty quick. also we had a guy show up with a radio he'd never actually used on a net before, like he'd had his ticket for two years and mostly just listened on the repeater. watching him try to handle formal Winlink traffic under simulated pressure was kind of a wake up call for everyone including him, he was a good sport about it though.

the thing that went really well was our liaison with the Red Cross shelter. we had a pre-agreed message format and the volunteer there actually knew what to expect from us which made everything smoother. lesson from previous drills apparently.

curious if anyone else has run exercises recently and what surprised them. especially interested in power management stuff since thats clearly where i need to work

yeah the battery thing gets everybody at least once. we did a similar drill a couple years back and the guy running the EOC station had a big deep cycle he was super proud of, turned out hed never actually load tested it under real conditions and it was pretty much toast inside. now our group has a rule that every piece of kit gets a full functional test at least 60 days before any activation or scheduled exercise, not just a visual check.

the inexperienced operator thing is real too. we actually started doing monthly "traffic nights" on our local repeater just for that reason, low stakes practice so when something real happens people arent fumbling through ICS-213 forms for the first time. makes a huge difference. the folks who only show up for the big drills are usually the ones who freeze up or start freaking out on frequency when things get hectic.

sounds like your group is doing good work though, the Red Cross coordination piece is honestly harder to get right than most of the radio stuff

this is really interesting to read, im still pretty new (got my general last spring) and ive been thinking about getting involved with ARES but honestly wasnt sure if id be useful at all. do groups usually welcome people who are still learning or is it mostly experienced ops? i dont want to be that guy who slows everything down during an actual activation