so we finally did a full scale simulated emergency exercise with our local ARES group, first one ive actually participated in as a net control and not just as a field unit. figured id share some thoughts since we had a few newer hams show up and i think there's some real lessons in how it went.

the scenario was a flood event cutting off the northern part of the county, three shelters needing coordination with the EOC. on paper it sounds straightforward but man when you actually try to run it with 12 operators scattered around at different locations, half of them on HT's with battery packs and one guy who forgot his power cable entirely, things get complicated fast.

biggest thing i noticed — and i probably should have anticipated this — was that people defaulted to casual conversation habits on the air during the exercise. like folks would just start chatting about what they were seeing instead of keeping traffic formatted properly. had to gently redirect a couple times. nobody's fault really, it's just muscle memory from normal rag chewing and it takes practice to flip that switch.

the other thing that caught us off guard was how quickly our simplex fallback frequency got stepped on by a repeater bleed from the next county over. we had that written into the plan but when it actually happened in real time there was this moment of confusion before someone remembered we had a secondary listed. would have been nice to drill that specific scenario more deliberately.

anyone else done exercises like this recently? curious what other groups are doing for realistic disaster scenarios and how you debrief afterward. our after action review was kind of rushed and i feel like we left some good lessons on the table.

yeah the voice discipline thing is so real. we had the same issue at ours a couple years back, people just naturally want to explain everything in long sentences when you really need short formatted traffic. what helped us was doing a short 20 minute tabletop before the actual exercise just to run through message format until it felt a bit more automatic. not perfect but it reduced the chatter noticeably during the real drill.

on the simplex getting stepped on — honestly i'd recommend building two or three fallback freqs into the plan and making sure everyone has them written down physically, not just in their phone or whatever. we learned that the hard way during a winter storm actual where one of our guys couldn't pull up the backup freq because his phone battery died. paper wins every time in those situations.

for after action reviews we started assigning someone specifically to take notes during the exercise itself, not just after. that way you're capturing real time confusion as it happens rather than trying to remember it all afterward. makes the debrief way more useful.

this is the kind of stuff i wish i'd read before my first exercise honestly. i showed up to one about six months after getting my ticket thinking i basically just needed to know how to key up and say my callsign and uh... it was a lot more than that. nobody told me what ICS was or why the net control kept asking for message numbers. felt pretty lost for the first hour.

does your group do any kind of orientation for new people before throwing them into a full exercise? or is it more just learn by doing