so we did a simulated disaster exercise last saturday, county-wide thing coordinated with the local emergency management office. i've been licensed for about 6 years and done maybe 3 or 4 of these over the years but this one really hit different for some reason.

the scenario was a major flood event cutting off the eastern part of the county, bridges out, cell towers down, the whole thing. we had maybe 14 operators spread across shelter sites, the EOC, and a couple mobile units. on paper it looked solid. in practice... well.

first thing that went sideways was nobody agreed on the net frequency ahead of time. i know we had it in the documentation but half the guys either didnt read it or had old paperwork. spent the first 20 minutes just trying to get everyone on the same page which in a real event could be genuinely bad. second thing was battery life - one of the shelter operators showed up with a barely charged battery on his HT and was basically useless by hour three.

the stuff that actually worked well was the ICS message handling, once we got rolling the traffic flow was pretty clean and the EC did a good job keeping things organized. also had a guy running a winlink station that ended up being the MVP honestly, sent formal messages to the state EOC without any issues.

anyone else done exercises lately and have things to share? feels like these after-action discussions are where you actually learn stuff but they dont always happen the way they should

yeah the frequency coordination thing is such a consistent problem and it drives me crazy because its so preventable. we started laminating a single card with the primary, secondary, and simplex fallback freqs and making sure every operator has one physically in their go bag before any exercise or activation. sounds obvious but you'd be surprised.

the battery thing too - we actually made it a rule that if you show up to an activation or even a drill with less than 80% charge on anything you brought, you get a friendly but firm talking-to. harsh maybe but in a real event that stuff matters. we also started keeping a small cache of charged batteries and a couple of those big USB power banks at the EOC just for situations like what you described.

the winlink comment is interesting, we've been debating whether to push harder on that in our group. some of the older guys are resistant for whatever reason but the ability to send a proper ICS-213 without needing a phone connection is pretty hard to argue against. did your guy use a dedicated TNC or one of the soundcard setups?

im kind of new to all this - just got my general a few months ago and im trying to get more involved with the local ARES group but honestly exercises like what you're describing sound a little intimidating. like i understand the basics of HF and VHF operation but the whole ICS and message handling side of things feels like a whole other world to learn.

is there a good way to get up to speed on that stuff before jumping into an exercise? i dont want to be the guy who slows everything down because he doesnt know the procedures