so we finally got around to doing a full scale simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group and honestly it was a real eye opener. the scenario was a major flooding event that knocked out all the repeaters in the southern part of the county and we had to establish comms from scratch using nothing but simplex HF and a couple of portable VHF setups.

first thing that went wrong — and i mean within like the first 20 minutes — was that nobody could agree on what frequencies we were supposed to fall back to. we had a plan on paper but half the guys hadnt looked at it since we updated it six months ago. so we basically spent the first half hour just sorting out who was on what and whether everybody had the right PL tones loaded. meanwhile in a real disaster that half hour is everything.

the other big thing was battery life. we kind of assumed everybody showed up with charged gear and yeah, that was a bad assumption. one of our most experienced guys showed up with a radio that had maybe 2 hours of runtime on it. again, in a real event that would have been a serious problem.

anyway we learned a lot and i think the exercise was worth every bit of the chaos. curious if anyone else has done similar drills recently and what kind of stuff caught you off guard. seems like the lessons are always the same but you still have to live through them yourself to really internalize it i guess.

yeah the frequency coordination thing gets me every time. we had almost the exact same problem in our group a couple years back and what finally helped was we laminated a small card with the primary and secondary freqs, PL tones, and a brief net flow and just made it mandatory that the card lives in every go kit. simple fix but you wouldnt believe how much smoother things ran after that.

the battery thing is honestly harder to solve because you cant really enforce it. we started doing a quick equipment check at the start of every drill — not in a military way, just "hey everybody key up once on your HT and tell us your battery level" and that at least creates some accountability. had a few people show up embarrassed after that and start taking it more seriously.

the frequency thing though really does come down to training frequency. no pun intended. if you only look at the plan once a year during a drill it wont stick. we try to run a short net on our simplex fallback freq once a month just to keep the muscle memory there.

this is really good to hear about, im still pretty new to ARES and just got my general last spring so i havent been to a drill yet but my EC keeps talking about running one later this year. the stuff about batteries is kind of making me rethink my go kit honestly, i built mine out of whatever i had laying around and i dont think ive ever actually tested how long it lasts under continuous use. probably should do that before i show up to something and embarass myself lol