So we ran a county-wide simulated emergency exercise Saturday and I figured I'd write up some thoughts while its still fresh. Overall it went better than last year but there were some pretty glaring gaps that showed up once we actually put stress on the system.

The big one for us was net control discipline. We had three different operators rotate through NCS duties during the six hour sim and the handoffs were rough — like really rough. The incoming operator didnt have a complete picture of what traffic had already been passed and we ended up with duplicate messages going to the EOC which caused some confusion on the served agency side. One of the CERT coordinators actually asked us if we had two different nets running because the info she was getting seemed contradictory.

The other thing that bit us was everyone defaulting to the repeater even after we specifically briefed that the scenario included a repeater failure at hour two. Old habits I guess. We lost probably 20 minutes of effective communication time while people figured out why nobody was answering on the usual frequency.

What I thought went well though — our digital guys were awesome. Winlink traffic was flowing smoothly, the two operators running packet did a fantastic job keeping the message log clean. That was a real bright spot.

Anyone else done exercises recently where a specific failure mode surprised you? Curious what other groups are dealing with.

That NCS handoff problem is super common and honestly I think its one of those things that looks easy on paper but falls apart under even mild pressure. What we started doing in our group is keeping a running log sheet — not just the message traffic but a quick status block at the top that gets updated every 30 minutes or so. Net conditions, any frequencies in use, which stations have checked in, what traffic is pending. When the new NCS sits down they read the block out loud to confirm they have the picture. Sounds almost too simple but it cut down our handoff confusion a lot.

The repeater thing though, yeah that one stings. We did an exercise two years ago where we simulated a full infrastructure failure and about half the group just kind of froze because simplex felt unfamiliar. We now do a simplex-only net once a month just to keep those skills up. Not exciting but it matters when things go sideways for real.

ive only been licensed about a year so i wasnt at an exercise like that but reading this makes me realize how much i dont know about actual emergency operation. like i can work a repeater and ive made a few HF contacts but the whole ICS structure and message handling stuff is kind of intimidating. is there a good way to get involved without feeling completely useless at a drill? i looked at my local ARES group online but their website looks like it hasnt been updated since 2019 so not sure if theyre even active