so we finally did a full county-wide simulated emergency exercise last saturday and honestly it was one of the most eye-opening things ive done in amateur radio in years. we had about 14 operators spread across the EOC, two shelter sites, and a couple mobile units trying to pass formal traffic and coordinate resource requests like a real activation would go.

the good stuff first — our net control guy did a fantastic job staying calm and keeping things organized even when three stations tried to check in at the same time. and the ICS-213 message passing worked way smoother than our last drill from like two years ago, people actually remembered to include all the fields this time which was nice.

but here's where it kind of fell apart. we had two operators who had never actually used Winlink before just kind of frozen at their laptops during the digital portion. they'd done it at home on a regular basis supposedly but something about the actual pressure of the exercise made everything go sideways. one guy couldnt remember his password, the other had an old version of Winlink Express that wouldnt connect properly. we lost probably 20 minutes just on that.

also nobody had thought through the simplex fallback plan if the repeater went down. we tested it midway through by having the EC announce the repeater was 'down' and the group kind of just went quiet for an uncomfortable amount of time before someone suggested a simplex frequency. we had it written down somewhere but not everyone had that sheet with them.

anyway just wanted to share since I know a lot of groups are doing fall exercises right now. would love to hear what other people have run into during drills, especially around digital modes and fallback planning.

the Winlink thing is so real and it catches people every single time. we had almost the exact same issue during a drill maybe three years ago and now we have a rule in our group that if youre on the digital team you have to do a test connection the night before and screenshot it or something just to prove everything is working. sounds a little overkill but it saved us at least twice since we started doing it.

the simplex fallback thing is something I think almost every group has a blind spot on. everybody assumes the repeater will just work and it usually does but that's not the point. we actually built a laminated quick reference card that has our primary freq, backup repeater, and two simplex channels on it and we hand them out at the start of every activation or drill. still have people who leave it in their car though so I dont know what you do about that honestly.

sounds like overall it was a really productive exercise though. the fact that you can identify those gaps now means your next real activation will go way better. do you debrief right after or wait a few days?

I just got my general last spring and our local ARES group let me tag along as kind of an observer for their drill a few months back. I had no idea how complicated the message handling side of things was. like I knew ham radio was used for emergencies but watching people try to coordinate between sites in real time while also keeping a log and talking on the radio all at once made me realize I have a lot to learn before I'd actually be useful in something like that. did your group have any newer hams involved or was it mostly experienced operators?