so we finally got our ARES group together for a full day tabletop plus actual radio exercise last saturday and honestly i learned more in those 8 hours than i had in months of just reading about emergency comms. figured id share some stuff that surprised me or caught us off guard in case anyone else is planning something similar.

the biggest thing that hit me was how fast message traffic gets backed up when you only have two operators handling net control and the simulated 'served agency' keeps changing their mind about what they need. we were running Winlink for formal traffic and voice on the local 2m repeater as backup and at one point the repeater went down (on purpose, they didnt tell us ahead of time) and like half the group just... froze. nobody had confirmed their simplex fallback frequencies before the drill started. that was embarrassing but also really good to find out now and not during an actual event.

also found out one of our members had a go-bag that hadnt been touched in two years and his HT battery was completely dead. again, better now than during a real deployment. the whole thing was kind of humbling but in a good way. curious if anyone else has done these kinds of exercises and what caught you off guard

yeah the repeater going down without warning is such a classic drill move and it works every single time because nobody actually practices simplex until they have to. we had almost the exact same thing happen at a county drill a few years back. our EC at the time was pretty old school and he basically said if you cant operate without the machine you're not really prepared and i think about that a lot now.

the message traffic backlog thing is real too. one thing that helped us a lot was pre-assigning a dedicated liaison operator just for the served agency interface so net control wasnt trying to also interpret what the EOC needed at the same time. sounds obvious but we didn't do it that way for a long time. the ICS-213 forms help too once everyone actually knows how to fill them out, which is a whole other problem haha.

dead batteries in go-bags are basically a universal experience i think. we started doing a quick 'equipment check' meeting every six months just to catch that stuff. nothing fancy just everyone powers up their gear and we make sure things are charged and antennas are accounted for.

this is the kind of post i needed to see honestly, im still pretty new and have been thinking about getting more involved with ARES but wasnt sure what to expect from the actual exercises. the part about people freezing when the repeater dropped is kind of eye opening — i definitely dont have simplex frequencies memorized or really even programmed in properly now that i think about it. gonna go fix that tonight actually.