so our local ARES group finally did a full scale simulated exercise last saturday and i wanted to share what happened because some of it was kind of eye opening, especially for those of us who think we're more prepared than we actually are

the scenario was a major flood event cutting off three municipalities from normal communications infrastructure, cell towers down, power out in two of the three areas, the whole deal. we had about 14 operators deployed across different served agencies and a net control set up at the EOC

the part that surprised me most was how quickly message handling fell apart. like we all know the ICS forms and we've practiced traffic handling but when you're actually in a simulated environment with people throwing information at you from three directions at once, the paper forms become a real bottleneck. one of our guys at the shelter site was trying to relay health and welfare traffic while also handling logistics requests and he basically froze up for like 10 minutes trying to prioritize

we also had some antenna issues at the EOC that nobody caught during setup because everyone assumed someone else had checked the coax run. classic. the SWR was way off and we lost probably 40 minutes troubleshooting something that should have been done as part of the go-kit checkout

anyway the debrief was really valuable and the EC is putting together some changes to how we do pre-deployment checks. curious if anyone else has run drills lately and what surprised them

yeah the message handling thing is SO real. we did a similar exercise maybe two years ago and our biggest failure was almost identical, people just weren't trained enough on actual NTS formatted traffic to do it under pressure. everyone knows how in a classroom setting and then it all goes sideways when theres noise and stress and someone is standing over your shoulder asking when the medical supply request is going to get relayed

what we ended up doing after that was running monthly traffic nets specifically for the ARES members, not just showing up to the regular nets but actually doing practice sessions where we deliberately add distractions and make people handle multiple messages at once. it helped a lot. still not perfect but people are way more comfortable now

the coax thing is also something that will never go away i think. doesnt matter how experienced the group is, pre-deployment checklist discipline is really hard to maintain when people are rushing to set up. we literally have a laminated card now that has to be signed off before any antenna goes up at a deployment site. feels a little overkill but after losing time like that during a real activation you start to appreciate the boring stuff

this is the kind of post i needed to read today honestly. im still pretty new to ARES, only been involved about 8 months and i've been nervous about whether i'd actually be useful in a real event. its reassuring in a weird way to hear that even experienced operators run into problems during exercises because i was starting to feel like everyone else had it all figured out except me

one thing i'm curious about is how you handled the prioritization issue after the fact, like did the EC change up the operating procedures for how a single operator handles multiple traffic types simultaneously or is that just something that comes with more reps