so our local ARES group ran a simulated disaster exercise last saturday and i have to say it was kind of humbling. we were doing a scenario where the county EOC had lost all infrastructure and we had to pass health and welfare traffic plus coordinate shelter assignments between three different served agencies. sounds straightforward on paper but man, when you actually try to do it with a dozen operators who dont drill together very often it gets messy fast.

biggest thing i noticed was that nobody had a consistent way of passing formatted messages. some guys were doing it ICS-213 style, some were just freeforming it over the air, and a couple of the newer operators clearly had never done formal net control before and were kind of talking over each other. we also had one situation where two stations on the same simplex frequency didnt realize they were stepping on each other because one of them had a squelch issue and couldnt hear the other coming up.

the after action review was actually the most valuable part. the net manager basically said look, we train the way we fight, and if we cant pass a clean message in a drill we are definitely not gonna do it when stuff is actually burning down. which is fair. anyway curious if other groups do these regularly and what kind of scenarios have worked well for your area. we're in a region that gets a lot of flooding so that tends to be our go-to scenario but i wonder if we should mix it up more.

yeah we do quarterly exercises with the county and honestly the message handling piece is always the weak link no matter how many times we go over it. what helped us a lot was just making everyone go through a written message passing exercise on a net before we ever put them in a real drill. like they have to take a message, read it back correctly, log it, and pass it to another station. boring but it actually sticks.

the squelch thing is a real problem too, we had almost the exact same issue at our last SET. one of our guys had his radio set to tone squelch and missed half the net traffic because he wasnt on the right tone. now we basically mandate open squelch or at least verify settings at check-in. small thing but it caused a 20 minute gap in comms during the exercise which in a real event could be pretty bad.

for scenarios, flooding is solid because its realistic for your area but if you want to stress test the group try doing one where you lose a key operator mid-exercise, like the net control has to hand off unexpectedly. thats where you find out real quick if anyone else knows how to run the net.

this is the kind of post that makes me want to get more involved with ARES honestly. im still pretty new, just got my general last spring, and ive been to a couple of the local meetings but havent done a full drill yet. the message handling stuff sounds intimidating but i guess thats the point right, you want to mess up in the drill not when it actually matters.

quick question though - do you need any special gear to participate in these exercises or is a basic dual band HT enough to get started? i dont want to show up underprepared but i also dont have a mobile rig yet.