so i finally participated in my first real ARES simulated emergency exercise last saturday and honestly it was kind of humbling. i've had my general for about two years and thought i was pretty comfortable with nets and basic HF stuff but running actual disaster traffic was a whole different thing. we were simulating a major flood scenario with the county EOC and had to pass formal NTS-style messages to the hospital and shelter locations and i kept getting flustered when the net control would come back with corrections on my message format.

the biggest thing i took away was that i had basically never practiced sending formal written traffic under any kind of pressure before. i mean i can ragchew all day but when theres an actual message to pass with a header and a precedence and all that it was like my brain just froze. the guy running the exercise was really patient about it but i could tell i would have been a liability in a real event. also my backup power situation is embarrassing - i was running off my car battery with a cable i threw together the night before and it worked but barely.

anyway curious if other people have stories from drills or real activations where something unexpected tripped them up. feel like this stuff doesnt get talked about enough compared to like antenna comparisons and new radio reviews.

yeah that message format thing gets everyone the first few times. i remember my first activation back during the ice storm in 2019 - actual event not even a drill - and i had practiced ICS forms plenty but when the served agency rep handed me a piece of paper and just said "get this to sector 4" i had absolutely no idea what precedence to assign it. stood there probably way too long before someone older and wiser just looked over my shoulder and said routine, send it as routine, lets go.

the backup power thing is real too. our group actually made it a requirement after a drill a few years back where half the portable stations dropped off within like 90 minutes. we do a full go-kit inspection now before any exercise and it feels overly formal but it genuinely catches stuff. one guy showed up last year with a battery that hadnt been charged since the previous years drill. under load it was putting out like 10.8 volts. not great.

the drills that feel a little uncomfortable or expose gaps are the valuable ones honestly. the ones where everything goes smooth and everyone slaps each other on the back dont teach you much. glad your group is doing them.

This is something I keep meaning to get more involved with but haven't pulled the trigger on yet. Does ARES do training before they throw you into an exercise or is it mostly learn by doing? I'm a little worried about slowing everyone down if I dont really know what im doing with the formal traffic stuff.