so i finally participated in a simulated emergency test through our local ARES group and honestly i went in thinking i was pretty prepared and came out feeling like a complete beginner again, which I guess is kind of the point right

we were doing a scenario where the EOC had lost all commercial power and internet and we had to pass health and welfare traffic through a net to a neighboring county. sounds simple enough on paper but when you're actually doing it with real message forms and real time pressure and someone is reading you a Winlink message over voice because the digital link went down... it's a different thing entirely

the biggest thing that tripped me up was just the ICS stuff. like i know what ICS is, i took the FEMA courses online, but when the net control starts asking for your resource status and wants it in a specific format i completely blanked. also our group was using a mix of HF and VHF and there was this whole period where nobody could hear the HF net control and we burned probably 20 minutes just trying to figure out if it was a propagation issue or if he had equipment trouble. turned out he had accidentally bumped his mic gain down but we had no way to know that from our end

anyway just wanted to share in case other newer folks are thinking about joining their local ARES or RACES group. definitely do it but also go in knowing youre gonna get humbled a little

yeah the ICS stuff gets everybody the first time, dont feel bad. i've been doing emcomm for about twelve years now and i still see experienced operators freeze up when the net control asks for a formal resource check. the thing is the online courses teach you the theory but they cant really simulate the cognitive load of actually handling radio traffic at the same time you're trying to remember what your ICS-214 is supposed to look like

the mic gain thing is actually a really common failure mode and it's kind of a perfect lesson honestly. one of the things we started doing in our group after a similar situation is a quick radio check protocol at the start of every activation where everybody confirms audio levels before anything else happens. takes maybe five minutes but it's saved us from a lot of confusion. the other thing we do now is always have a designated backup net control on a different radio in case the primary goes down or has issues, even if that person is just sitting there doing nothing for the whole exercise

keep going to those drills, the discomfort is literally the whole point of doing them before a real event

the HF propagation vs equipment issue thing is such a real problem. we had almost the exact same scenario play out during a SET a few years back except it wasn't the mic gain, our net control had his antenna connector come loose and nobody could figure out why his signal was so weak. cost us like half the exercise trying to diagnose it remotely which is obviously not something you can really do

i think that's one of the best lessons from any drill honestly, redundancy in everything. not just equipment but people too. we now make a point of having at least two people at every critical node who both know how to operate everything at that station