so we finally ran our big tabletop-turned-actual-exercise last Saturday and I wanted to share how it went because honestly it was way more eye-opening than I expected going in. The scenario was a multi-day severe weather event cutting off the county EOC from the state, and we had to pass health and welfare traffic plus coordinate shelter assignments using just HF and a couple VHF repeaters.

The stuff that tripped us up most wasn't the radio part — it was the paperwork and the handoffs. Like someone would pass a message perfectly on the air and then the person on the receiving end at the EOC table would write it down wrong or not at all. We had ICS forms everywhere but nobody was really sure who was supposed to fill out what. Also one of our main guys had a laptop with all the Winlink templates and his battery died about 2 hours in and we hadn't tested whether anyone else had the same setup. Spoiler: we hadn't.

The HF side actually held up better than I thought. Got into the state net with my IC-7300 running off a deep cycle and the end-fed seemed fine even with all the people walking around. But there was this one period where we lost the local repeater because somebody forgot to check the backup power at the repeater site before the drill. So that was a fun 20 minutes of scrambling.

Anyway curious if others have run exercises like this recently and what lessons came out of it. Feels like every time we do one we find three new things to fix.

yeah the message handling piece is almost always where exercises fall apart in my experience. People practice the radio skills and then assume the rest just works itself out but it doesnt. We had a similar issue a few years back where our net control was logging contacts fine but nobody was actually tracking which messages had been delivered vs just sent. Ended up with a bunch of duplicates and some that got lost entirely.

What helped us a lot was running a smaller drill first, like just 4 or 5 operators, specifically focused on the paperwork flow from start to finish before we tried to scale it up. Boring but it really showed where the gaps were. Also designating one person as basically a traffic manager at the EOC who doesnt touch a radio at all and just handles the forms — that made a huge difference. The radio people can focus on the radio and someone else worries about the ICS forms.

The repeater backup power thing is a classic. We put it on a checklist now but for a long time it just kind of got assumed. Good on you for running the drill and catching this stuff now instead of during an actual event.

This is the kind of post I really needed to read honestly. I just got my general a few months ago and I've been going to our local ARES meetings but haven't been sure whether to jump into an exercise yet since I feel like I barely know what im doing on HF. But reading this it sounds like even the experienced people find stuff to work on so maybe I should just show up and be useful in whatever small way I can.

Question though — do you need a specific setup to participate in something like that or can you just show up with a handheld and help out? I dont have a full HF station yet and I've been worried I'd be in the way.