so we did a simulated hurricane comms exercise through our local ARES group this past saturday and honestly i went in thinking it'd be kind of boring but it really wasnt. we had to assume all repeaters were down and practice passing formal traffic using winlink and also some voice nets on simplex which sounds easy until you realize half the guys cant actually hear each other on HT's from across town.

the big thing i took away from it was how bad our ICS documentation habits are. like we'd get a message passed correctly but nobody was writing down times or operator callsigns consistently, and the net control guy (who is excellent normally) was getting overwhelmed trying to track everything at once. it made me realize i should probably be way more familiar with ICS 213 forms than i am.

curious if anyone else has done these kinds of exercises and what caught you off guard the most. especially interested if anyone's done a full multi-day deployment sim or worked alongside actual served agencies during a drill

yeah the simplex thing gets everyone. we did something similar a couple years back during a SKYWARN activation exercise and the path loss between neighborhoods that look close on a map is brutal with a 5 watt HT. one guy was literally two miles away and completely unreadable. after that we mapped out a handful of relay positions and now we actually practice using them which helps a lot.

the ICS paperwork stuff is real though. i've been doing emcomm stuff for probably 15 years and the documentation discipline is genuinely the hardest part to get people to take seriously during drills. everyone wants to do the radio stuff and nobody wants to be the guy filling out forms. but served agencies actually care about that paper trail more than they care about your antenna setup, learned that the hard way when we supported a county EOC exercise and the emergency manager basically ignored our radio traffic because we couldn't hand her a clean log afterward.

this is making me want to join our local ARES group finally. ive been putting it off because i only got my general like 8 months ago and figured i wasnt ready but maybe thats the wrong way to think about it. do most groups welcome newer hams for drills or is it mostly the experienced guys running everything