So we ran a simulated disaster exercise through our county ARES group this past Saturday, kind of a mock earthquake scenario where the assumption was all repeaters down, no internet, no cell service. Just HF and some simplex VHF work between net control and the various EOC check-in points scattered around the county.

I've been licensed about 11 years now and I thought I was pretty well prepared but honestly this drill humbled me a bit. My go-bag radio had a battery I hadn't topped off in like 4 months and it was showing it. Got maybe 90 minutes out of it before I was scrambling. Also realized my written frequency list was from 2019 and two of the simplex channels we were supposed to use had changed. Nobody told me, or maybe they did and I missed the email, but either way I was that guy on the net asking for a repeat of the working frequency which felt pretty embarrassing in a real scenario context.

The bigger lesson for me was message handling. We did some basic ICS-213 traffic and I have not practiced that in probably two years. My forms were a mess and the NCS had to ask me to retransmit twice. All stuff that would be genuinely bad in a real activation.

Anyone else do exercises recently and have that kind of oh-no moment? Curious what trips people up most. Feels like the stuff that gets you is always the basics not the fancy gear.

yeah this hits close to home. we did a SKYWARN integration drill back in the spring and i had almost the exact same battery situation except mine was a handheld i grabbed out of a drawer and the charge indicator was lying to me lol. showed full, lasted maybe 45 minutes.

the ICS forms thing is real too. theres a reason some of our more experienced guys say you should run through a 213 at least once every few months just to keep the muscle memory. its not hard but when youre also trying to copy a frequency list and log traffic at the same time it gets sloppy fast. one thing our EC started doing is requiring everyone to submit at least one piece of formal traffic during our monthly nets, just to keep people from going totally rusty between activations. has helped a lot honestly.

the frequency list thing is just good practice to review every january or something, tie it to something you already do so it doesn't slip.

I'm still pretty new to all this — just got my General last year and joined ARES maybe six months ago — so reading posts like this is actually really useful for me. I haven't been to a real activation yet, just the monthly check-in nets, and I keep wondering what I'm not thinking about that will bite me when it matters.

The battery thing makes total sense now that you say it. I think I've been assuming my stuff is ready because I haven't touched it, which is kind of backwards logic when I think about it. Going to go plug everything in tonight and actually write down when I last charged what.

Quick question if you dont mind — when you say ICS-213, is that something specific to your group or is there like a standard version I should be practicing with? I've seen it mentioned a few times but haven't actually filled one out yet.