so our ARES group did a full scale exercise Saturday, we were simulating a major flood event where the EOC needed to coordinate with three different shelter locations and a mobile command unit out near the river. I've done a few tabletops before but this was the first time we actually deployed people to physical locations and tried to pass real traffic through the net.

honestly it went way better than I expected in some ways and way worse in others. The HF link to the county EOC was solid, like surprisingly solid, but the VHF simplex between the two shelters was a disaster because nobody had thought about the terrain between the community center and the high school. there's a ridge right in the middle and we basically had no comms for about 40 minutes while people figured out we needed a relay station up on Miller Road.

the other thing that caught us off guard was message handling. we had trained on ICS-213 forms and people knew the format but when things got hectic some of the incoming operators were just reading traffic too fast and the shelter teams couldn't copy it all down. we ended up having to repeat a lot and the net got really congested for a while.

curious if anyone else has done exercises like this and what tripped you up the most, because I feel like no matter how much you prep there's always something that bites you

yeah the terrain thing gets people every single time. we did a similar drill about two years ago and had the exact same problem, spent months planning the net and nobody actually drove the routes to check simplex coverage. after that our EC made it a requirement that we do a coverage survey of any new deployment area before we finalize the communications plan. sounds obvious in hindsight but when youre sitting in a meeting room with a map it all looks fine.

the message handling piece is a real skill gap in a lot of groups I think. reading traffic on the air is different from practicing it in a room, people get nervous or rushed and start dropping words. we now do standalone message passing drills separate from the big exercises just to build that muscle memory. even just getting on a local net once a week and passing a couple formal messages helps a ton. the winlink crowd sometimes gets grief for not doing voice but honestly having a written record that doesn't depend on someone copying fast is worth thinking about for certain types of traffic.

this is the kind of post I needed to read because our club is talking about doing our first real field exercise and I had no idea terrain would be such a big issue. I'm still pretty new and I just assumed if we had good antennas it would mostly work out. guess I was wrong about that. how did you end up setting up the relay on Miller Road, did someone just drive up there with a handheld or did you have a more permanent setup?