so we finally got around to doing a full-scale simulated disaster exercise with our county ARES group, something we'd been talking about doing for like two years and kept putting off. the scenario was a major earthquake that knocked out most of the repeater infrastructure plus commercial power, and we had to coordinate simulated shelter operations across four sites using only simplex and a couple of HF links back to the EOC.

I've been licensed about six years and thought I honestly had a pretty decent handle on how this stuff works in theory. what I wasn't prepared for was how quickly things broke down when people started actually trying to pass traffic under a little bit of pressure. nothing crazy, just the exercise coordinator throwing in curveballs like "repeater on 146.940 is now down" or "net control is unavailable, someone else take over" and you could just hear people kind of freeze up on the air.

the biggest thing i took away is that we need to practice net control handoff WAY more. we also had a few guys show up with gear that hadn't been tested in months, one radio had a dead battery pack that nobody caught until he needed it, and we had one station that couldn't make reliable simplex contact from his location even though on paper the path looked fine.

anyway curious if other groups have done exercises like this recently and what caught you off guard. we're trying to figure out what to work on before we do another one in the fall.

yeah the net control handoff thing is huge and I think almost every group underestimates it until they actually try it live. we ran into the exact same thing a couple years back during a SET exercise. everybody kind of assumes there's always going to be someone experienced at the helm and then when that person isn't available suddenly nobody wants to step up or they step up but dont really know the standard procedures well enough to keep traffic moving smoothly.

what helped our group was just making net control rotation a regular thing during our weekly nets, not just for emergencies. even if its a slow Tuesday night with five check-ins, we'd have a different person run it each time. took maybe six months before it started feeling natural for more people. also the dead battery thing is a perennial problem honestly, we eventually made a rule that if you show up to a drill with gear that isnt ready to go youre basically just an observer that day, which sounds harsh but it got people taking the prep part more seriously.

sounds like you got a lot of good data out of it though, the exercises that go a little sideways teach you way more than the ones where everything goes perfectly.

the simplex coverage gap thing is something I feel like almost nobody actually maps out ahead of time. everyone just kind of assumes it'll work because the math says it should, but terrain does weird things and you dont really know until you key up and listen for an answer. we had a shelter site in our county that was behind a ridge just enough to make direct simplex to the EOC basically unusable, found that out during a drill and it was pretty awkward. ended up needing a relay station which then added complexity nobody had planned for.

have you guys done any actual simplex coverage testing outside of drill conditions? even just driving around and keying up from the spots you'd expect to use can save a lot of headaches later.