so we finally got around to doing a proper tabletop-turned-actual-field exercise with our county ARES group and honestly it was a humbling experience. we've been talking about doing one for like two years and kept pushing it back for various reasons, weather, scheduling, the usual.

the scenario was a major flood event cutting off three communities from normal comms infrastructure — cell towers down, EOC needs health and welfare traffic handled, shelters need to coordinate with the county EOC. pretty realistic stuff given what happened in the region a few years back.

what went sideways almost immediately: two of our operators showed up without knowing their assigned frequencies. we had put them in a net roster that got emailed out but apparently some people just... didnt read it. so right out of the gate we had confusion on simplex trying to get everyone on the same page. net control had to basically restart the check-in process twice.

the other thing that caught us off guard was how quickly the message traffic volume got overwhelming when we were doing it realistically. when we just practice sending one or two radiograms at a meeting it feels manageable but when youre simulating actual shelter population numbers coming in and outgoing welfare messages it piles up fast. our message handling was genuinely stressed and i think a couple forms got filled out wrong under pressure.

on the positive side our HF link to the section EOC held up great, the operator there was fantastic and we had solid copy the whole time. and people really seemed to engage with it more than our usual tabletop stuff. anyway curious if others have done similar exercises and what caught you off guard the first time

yeah the message traffic thing is no joke. our group ran into exactly that same wall a while back. everyone can handle a few radiograms in a comfortable meeting room but throw in some stress and a realistic pace and suddenly the format goes out the window. we actually started running what we call a "traffic sprint" at the end of every monthly meeting now — basically someone plays net control and just fires messages at people as fast as reasonable for about 15 minutes. no stakes, just reps. it's helped a lot with people getting the muscle memory down so they're not thinking so hard about the form when things get hectic.

the frequency assignment thing is such a classic problem too. we eventually moved to laminated cards that get handed out physically at the activation point. if it's not in their hand they won't have it when it matters. email is basically useless for that stuff in my experience, people file it away and forget.

this is really interesting to read, im still fairly new to all the ARES stuff and havent been in a full drill yet. we have one coming up in the fall I think. the part about message volume is kind of intimidating honestly, i've been working on my radiogram format but like you said doing one at a meeting feels pretty different from what youre describing. do you think it helps to have done some actual nets like NTS before a drill like this, or did most of your operators come in without much traffic handling background?