so we ran a simulated disaster drill on saturday with our county ARES group and honestly i wasnt expecting much, figured it would be the usual guys standing around with their HTs pretending to relay messages but it actually got pretty intense at a few points and i learned more in 4 hours than i have in like a year of just ragchewing on the repeater

the scenario was a major flood event cutting off the EOC from three shelter locations and we had to pass ICS 213 traffic back and forth using only simplex since the repeater was 'down' for the exercise. and man, simplex is a whole different animal when you actually need it. i've been licensed for 6 years and i think i'd maybe used simplex twice. my signal to one of the shelter sites was basically unusable from my usual operating position and i had to go mobile and find a better spot which took way longer than it should have

anyone else done these kinds of drills recently? curious what scenarios your groups are running and what caught you off guard. also wondering if there's a good way to practice message handling on your own without waiting for the next official exercise

yeah the simplex thing gets people every time. we did a similar exercise maybe two years ago and half the group had never seriously thought about what happens when the machine goes down. everybody's so used to hitting the repeater that going simplex feels like switching to a different hobby almost.

one thing that really helped our group was doing what we call 'no repeater tuesdays' where we just make a point of doing our weekly net on simplex instead of through the club repeater. doesn't solve everything but at least people start to get a feel for their actual coverage and figure out where the dead spots are before it matters. also forced a few people to finally put up better antennas which is never a bad thing.

for practicing message handling on your own, honestly just get on winlink or find someone else in the group who wants to do some informal traffic passing on an HF net. the ARRL has nets specifically for that, NTS stuff, and even if the traffic is just practice messages it gets the muscle memory going for the format and the phonetics and all of it.

this is actually what made me want to get my general after being a tech for forever. went to one of these as basically an observer to see what ARES was about and watching people actually struggle to get traffic through when conditions werent cooperating made me realize how much i didnt know. the guys who really had it together were the ones who had clearly done it enough times that they werent thinking about the radio stuff anymore, they were just thinking about the message

i think i read somewhere that one of the big lessons from actual hurricane deployments is that people show up with gear they've never really tested under stress and then wonder why things fall apart. seems like your group is ahead of a lot of them just by running realistic scenarios instead of the kind of drill where everything conveniently works