so our county ARES group finally got around to doing a full simulated disaster exercise last Saturday and I figured id post about it because we made some mistakes that I think are worth talking about. The scenario was a major flood event that took out the repeater infrastructure — so we were supposed to fall back to simplex and then eventually HF to coordinate with the state EOC.

first thing that went wrong was that like half the guys showed up with their go-bags but nobody had tested their HTs recently and we had at least two people with dead batteries right off the bat. One person's radio had firmware weirdness that made it not scan right. Stuff like that. You kind of forget how much you assume everything just works until it suddenly doesnt in a timed drill scenario.

the simplex fallback was actually where things got interesting. We had real dead spots between the north staging area and the shelter location and nobody had really mapped those out ahead of time. We ended up having to relay through a guy parked on a hill in his truck which worked okay but slowed everything down. On HF we were using 60 meters and that worked really well actually, better than I expected for regional comms.

anyway the after-action review was pretty eye opening. EC is planning monthly tabletop exercises now instead of just the one big drill per year. Wondering if other groups do similar things and what scenarios have been most useful for you folks.

yeah the dead battery thing is so common it almost should be its own agenda item at every pre-exercise briefing. We have the same problem in our group and honestly the fix we landed on was just making a rule that everyone does a radio check with net control the Tuesday before any drill. Sounds basic but it cut our equipment failures way down.

the dead spots thing is a real issue though and I dont think enough groups take it seriously until they're actually in the field. We did a tabletop earlier this year that focused specifically on simplex path planning and it turned out to be one of our more useful sessions. Basically we just pulled up terrain maps and had people volunteer to test paths ahead of time. Took a few weeks of casual testing but now we have a pretty good sense of where the coverage holes are. 60 meters for regional HF is a great call by the way, more groups should have that in their playbook for sure.

this is really interesting to read as someone who just got their ticket a few months ago and joined ARES but hasnt been to a drill yet. I always kind of assumed the experienced guys had all this stuff figured out and it's weirdly reassuring to hear that dead batteries and coverage gaps are things everyone deals with. I've been nervous about showing up and not knowing what I'm doing but maybe that's less of a thing than I thought. Do you usually have a role for newer people in these exercises or is it mostly the experienced ops running things?