so our ARES group finally did a full scale exercise last saturday, simulating a major flood event cutting off the county EOC from most of the repeater infrastructure. we'd been talking about doing this for like two years and we finally just committed and did it.

honestly it went better than i expected in some ways and way worse in others. the stuff that worked fine was basically all the stuff we'd practiced a dozen times before — net control, check-ins, passing formal traffic. no surprises there. what completely fell apart was anything that required people to improvise. we had two operators who just kind of froze when the simulated repeater went down and they had to switch to simplex. one of them had never actually made a simplex contact in the field before, like ever, and it showed.

the other thing that bit us was battery backup. one operator showed up with a radio that had been sitting in his car for three months and the battery was basically dead. which, yeah, in a real event that's just game over for that station. we ended up adding a monthly battery check to our prep checklist after the fact but it felt like the kind of thing we should have already been doing.

anyone else run exercises like this and find stuff that surprised them? curious what other groups have found to be the weak points because im pretty sure our group isnt unique here

the simplex thing is so real. we had almost the exact same problem in our drill a couple years back. people get so used to the repeater being there that they honestly forget simplex is even an option until suddenly it isnt. after our exercise we started doing a simplex-only net once a month, just 20 minutes, nothing fancy. the difference in confidence after even a few months was noticeable.

the battery thing I've seen go wrong too many times to count. someone always shows up with a dead battery or a radio that hasnt been touched since the last drill. we actually started doing a quick radio check the night before any exercise now, just a 5 minute net where everyone confirms their gear is working. catches about half the problems before they become problems on the day.

sounds like overall though your group did the right thing by actually running the exercise instead of just talking about it. a lot of groups never get past the planning stage and then something real happens and they're completely unprepared. the stuff that breaks in a drill is way better than finding out during an actual event.

this is making me think i should probably actually test my go-kit before I need it instead of just assuming everything is fine lol. im pretty new to all the emcomm stuff but our club has been pushing us to get involved in ARES and I signed up a few months ago. havent done a real drill yet, just the check-ins.

question — when you say simplex do you mean like just picking a standard simplex frequency ahead of time and everyone knows to go there if the repeater drops, or is it more complicated than that? i feel like our group maybe hasnt covered this as clearly as they should have