so we finally did a full simulated emergency activation with our county ARES group, probably 14 operators involved total across three net control stations and a couple of field sites. overall i think it went pretty well but man did we learn some stuff the hard way.

biggest thing for me was how fast the paperwork side of things falls apart when you're tired and stressed. we were only two hours into the exercise and people were already skipping ICS forms or filling them out wrong, and this was just a drill with no real pressure. i keep thinking about what that looks like in an actual deployment where you havent slept and the served agency is asking you questions you dont have answers to yet.

also had one guy show up with a radio that hadn't been programmed with the current repeater frequencies. simple thing but it took like 20 minutes to sort out because nobody had a programming cable on site. we've been talking about doing a gear check before activations but never really formalized it. after this i think we're going to actually put together a pre-deployment checklist that people have to go through at home before they show up.

anyway curious if other groups have done similar exercises and what caught you off guard. especially interested if anyone has done hospital or EOC integration drills because that's our next goal and i have no idea where to start with that honestly.

the ICS paperwork thing is so real. we had almost the exact same problem at our first drill a few years back. what helped us was actually running shorter tabletop sessions in between the big exercises just focused on the forms, boring as that sounds. like an hour at a club meeting where someone walks through an ICS-214 with a fake scenario. people groaned about it but when we did the next full drill the improvement was really noticeable.

for the EOC integration stuff — definitely reach out to your county emergency manager before you do anything else. some of them are great to work with and will actually invite you to participate in their own exercises which is way more valuable than running something internally. others are a bit territorial so you kind of have to feel it out. but showing up with an actual capability demonstration rather than just saying hey we're hams we can help goes a long way. knowing your winlink setup cold, being able to show message traffic flowing reliably, that kind of thing tends to impress people who've had bad experiences with volunteers in the past.

the unprogrammed radio thing would have driven me crazy lol. we made a rule that everyone in our group has to verify their programmed freqs against the current channel plan at least a week before any activation or drill so theres time to fix it. sounds obvious but yeah.

im pretty new to all the ARES stuff, just got my general last spring, but i sat in on one of these drills as an observer and it was honestly kind of overwhelming. there was so much going on at net control and i couldnt really follow what the net manager was trying to do. do you guys do any kind of orientation for newer members before throwing them into a drill? i want to actually be useful if something real happens not just standing around confused.