so we ran a county-wide simulated emergency exercise last saturday and i have to say it did not go the way anyone expected. we had maybe 18 operators spread across 4 shelter sites plus a net control station at the EOC and within the first 20 minutes we already had people transmitting out of turn, message traffic getting garbled on the way to net control, and one of the sites completely lost comms because the guy running it forgot to bring a backup power source and his HT battery died.

the scenario was a flood event, roads cut off, primary infrastructure down, shelters filling up, all that. on paper it sounded manageable but once you're actually trying to pass formal traffic and coordinate resource requests at the same time as keeping a net running it gets chaotic fast. i've been doing ARES stuff for like 6 years and even i felt the stress of it.

biggest takeaway for me personally was that we dont practice formal message handling nearly enough. people know how to key up and talk but the moment you ask them to pass an ICS-213 message accurately over voice they start paraphrasing and that's where things fall apart. also nobody had their go-bag really dialed in, like people showed up without printed frequency lists or without knowing the backup simplex freqs if the repeater went down.

curious if other groups have found good ways to work this stuff into regular training without it feeling like homework. we want people to actually show up to practice sessions

yeah the message handling thing is a real problem everywhere not just your group. we did a similar drill about two years ago and honestly it was almost embarrassing how fast it fell apart once we simulated the repeater going down and everyone had to go simplex. half the guys didnt even know what frequencies we'd agreed on ahead of time.

what helped us a lot was doing short 30-minute nets on a random tuesday evening where the only goal was passing practice traffic. no scenario, no roleplay, just hey here's a message, pass it accurately, let's debrief. kept it low pressure and people actually started showing up more once they realized it wasnt going to eat their whole evening. after a few months the muscle memory starts to build and then when you do the big drill it's one less thing to worry about.

also the go-bag thing -- we made a laminated one-page cheat sheet with all our primary and backup freqs, the net control call, and a quick ICS-213 format reminder. took maybe 20 minutes to make and it's genuinely saved us during exercises when someone panics and blanks on procedure.

this is actually making me want to get more involved with our local ARES group. im still pretty new, only been licensed about 8 months, but ive been lurking on the club's emcomm nets and it does seem like a lot goes into it beyond just having a radio. do you need to know how to do formal traffic handling before you show up to something like this or is it more learn as you go? i wouldnt want to slow everyone down during an actual drill