so we ran a simulated disaster drill with the county ARES group on saturday, pretty standard stuff — pretend the EOC needs health and welfare traffic relayed because all the cell towers are down, you know the scenario. but man, a few things went sideways that i wasnt expecting and i think its worth talking about.

first thing was our net control guy had a total brain freeze on message formatting. we all practice it but when you put someone in a stressful fake scenario it just... evaporates. the ICS-213 forms we brought were the wrong version too, the county EOC had updated their forms and nobody told us. that was a fun conversation.

the bigger thing though was propagation just was not cooperating. we had guys trying to hit the 2m repeater from about 12 miles out and getting into the machine just fine normally, but we'd set up in a parking lot to simulate being away from home and suddenly that extra 15 feet of elevation you get from your tower at home makes a huge difference. a couple of us ended up going simplex which worked better than expected actually.

anyone else run exercises recently and find something that completely surprised them? feel like every time we do one of these i learn something i thought i already knew

yeah the elevation thing bites us every single time and yet somehow we're always surprised by it lol. we did a similar exercise about two months ago and one of our guys who checks into the net from home every week with a HT couldn't even key up the repeater from the shelter location we'd picked. same radio, same antenna, just not at his house anymore. ended up being a good lesson about not assuming your go-kit will perform the same as your shack setup.

the forms thing is real too. we actually started laminating a quick reference card for the net control position just to have something to glance at under pressure. nothing fancy, just the basics of how to handle a piece of traffic and the phonetic alphabet because you'd be shocked how many people go blank on G and P specifically for some reason. might be worth suggesting to your group if you dont already have something like that.

honestly the exercises that go a little wrong are way more valuable than the ones where everything works perfectly. if it all goes smooth you dont really find out where your weak spots are.

this is making me think i should actually show up to one of these. i keep meaning to get involved with our local ARES group but i always assume i dont know enough yet to be useful. reading stuff like this though it sounds like even experienced operators are still figuring things out so maybe thats a bad excuse on my part.

quick question though — when you say you went simplex, were you using a designated simplex calling frequency or just whatever worked? i've seen different things in different references and i'm never sure what the actual practice is when the repeater isnt cutting it