so i finally got off the bench and actually participated in one of the county ARES simulated emergency tests last saturday and i really wasnt prepared for how different it felt from just rag chewing or even contesting. like i know how to operate but when someone hands you a piece of paper with a message and says relay this to the EOC net control and do it NOW, the brain just kind of freezes for a second.

we were running a scenario where the main repeater had gone down (they actually took it offline for the exercise which was a gutsy move i thought) so we had to coordinate on a backup simplex frequency and figure out who could actually hear who. turns out there were some pretty significant dead spots that nobody really knew about because we all just assume the repeater covers everything. several stations basically couldnt reach net control directly and we had to set up relay stations on the fly which was not something anyone had really practiced before.

the other thing that got me was traffic handling. i write maybe 20 words per minute by hand and trying to copy a radiogram format accurately while also monitoring the frequency and keeping track of who else needs to check in... yeah. i think i need to practice that a lot more. anyone else do these exercises regularly? what do you work on to actually get better at this stuff, asking genuinely because i want to be useful if something real ever happens

yeah the repeater going down drill is one of the best things they can do honestly. most ARES groups never practice simplex and then when they actually need it nobody knows their own coverage area. we did something similar about two years ago and discovered that our designated backup simplex frequency had terrible coverage from the fire station which is kind of important to know before an actual disaster right.

for traffic handling the only thing that really helped me was just doing it over and over. the local NTS net runs every night and even if you only check in once or twice a week just handling a few formal messages gets you comfortable with the format. also writing fast enough to copy -- i eventually just started using a tablet and stylus because my handwriting under pressure is basically illegible. some purists dont love that but it works. the point of the exercise is to find the gaps before they matter, sounds like yours did exactly that.

that simplex dead spot thing is so real and it catches everyone off guard. i remember during a real activation a few years back (nothing huge, just a bad storm that knocked out some infrastructure) we had a volunteer at a shelter who genuinely could not hit any other station directly. ended up parking someone in a parking garage rooftop for like 3 hours just to act as a relay. worked fine but we definitely hadnt planned for it. now we do a simplex map exercise every year where everyone just goes to their assigned shelter or post and reports what they can and cant hear. takes maybe 90 minutes and you learn so much. anyway welcome to the exercise world, its frustrating but way better than finding this stuff out for real