so we finally got around to doing a proper tabletop sim that turned into a partial field exercise last saturday and honestly it was eye opening in ways i did not expect. the scenario was a major flood event cutting off the county EOC from like three of the outlying towns, we had to establish comms using only what we could carry in our go bags plus whatever was at the fixed stations.

first thing that fell apart was the net control situation. our primary NC had a family thing come up last minute and the backup guy, good operator, solid guy, but he hadnt practiced the role in probably eight months and it showed. traffic was getting garbled, people were doubling up on frequency, the whole thing got pretty chaotic for the first 20 minutes or so. once things settled it was fine but man those first 20 minutes felt very real in a bad way.

the other thing that got me was how fast batteries died when people were actually transmitting versus just assuming they would last because they tested fine at home. one of our guys had a go bag he said was ready to go and his HT was basically dead after 90 minutes of moderate use. we've been talking about standardizing on battery requirements for a while but this kind of hammered it home.

anybody else done sims recently and run into stuff like this? curious what other groups are doing for the NC succession thing especially.

yeah the battery thing gets everyone at least once. we had almost the exact same situation during a SET a few years back, guy swore his pack was good and then poof. our group ended up writing an informal checklist, nothing fancy, just stuff like charge date, load test result, that kind of thing, and members have to log it before any activation or drill. doesnt have to be official just needs to happen.

the net control succession problem is real and i dont think theres a clean fix other than just rotating the role more often during normal nets. like make your tuesday night 2m net a training ground, let different people run it, let them make small mistakes in a low stakes environment. by the time something real happens youve got five or six people who have actually done the job not just read about it.

this is really interesting to read, im fairly new to ARES and havent done a full drill yet just some tabletops. the part about the first 20 minutes being chaotic is kind of reassuring in a weird way because i always assumed experienced groups just had it together immediately. makes me less worried about messing up when i eventually do my first real exercise i guess. do most groups do a debrief after or does everyone just kind of go home