so we ran a simulated disaster exercise last saturday with our local ARES group and honestly it was kind of humbling. the scenario was a major flood event that knocked out cell infrastructure and we had to establish comms between the EOC and three shelter locations using only what we had available. sounded simple enough on paper.

first thing that went wrong was nobody had the same go-bag setup, like we had talked about standardizing our kits for months but nobody actually did it. one guy showed up with a ft-817 and a random wire antenna and another had a full IC-7300 in a pelican case which, great, but he had no way to power it for more than a couple hours. we managed to get everything running eventually but it took way longer than it should have and in a real event that delay could matter a lot.

the net control thing was also kind of a mess early on. people were doubling up, stepping on each other, and one station just kept calling in status updates without being prompted which cluttered the frequency. after about an hour things settled down and the ICS structure started actually working but getting there was rough.

curious if anyone else does these drills regularly and what lessons you've taken away from them. feels like the only way to really find out where your gaps are is to run the exercise and see what breaks. we're planning to debrief next week and i want to bring some ideas for improving things.

yeah we do quarterly exercises with our county ARES group and every single time something unexpected comes up, that's just the nature of it. the value isnt in running a perfect drill its in finding out what breaks under pressure before an actual event. sounds like your group learned a ton even if it felt messy in the moment.

the power situation you mentioned is something we had to really hammer on after one exercise where half our portable stations ran dry within four hours. we ended up putting together a standard checklist that everyone is supposed to review before any deployment — not fool proof but it helped a lot. the go-bag standardization thing is tough because people have different radios and budgets but at minimum agreeing on power capacity and antenna type saves a lot of headache.

net control discipline is probably the hardest thing to teach in a drill setting because the people who need the practice most are often the ones who dont realize they need it. we started doing a dedicated net control training session separate from the main exercise and that helped. also having a written net script that NCS follows keeps things from going off the rails when it gets busy. good luck with the debrief, sounds like your group is taking it seriously which is more than a lot of groups do.

the doubling up on transmissions thing drives me crazy, ive been in drills where it just devolves into people talking over each other and nothing gets through. kind of makes you realize how much we take the normal repeater etiquette for granted when theres actual stress involved. one thing our group tried was assigning each shelter a specific check-in window instead of open net format and that helped a lot with the chaos, at least in our scenario.