so we did a simulated disaster exercise through our local ARES group last Saturday, scenario was a major flood event cutting off a couple of the outlying towns from normal comms infrastructure, cell towers down, internet gone, the whole deal. I've been licensed about 6 years now but honestly this was only my second time doing one of these structured exercises and man there were some gaps I didn't even realize we had.

biggest thing for me personally was the net control situation - our primary NCS went "offline" as part of the sim and the backup guy hadn't really practiced taking over mid-net. there was like a solid 3-4 minutes of nobody really knowing what to do and traffic just kind of piling up. in a real event that's a bad situation. we talked through it after but it got me thinking about how often people actually practice the handoff and not just the "everything is working fine" version of net control.

also our message handling was rougher than I expected. ICS 213 forms, people were doing them differently, some folks had never filled one out under any time pressure before and it showed. not throwing shade at anyone, I made my share of mistakes too.

curious if other groups do these exercises regularly and what lessons have stuck with you from ones you've been part of. always trying to learn from other people's experiences on this stuff.

yeah the NCS handoff thing is real, we ran into almost the exact same issue a couple years back during a county-wide exercise. what we started doing after that was rotating who runs net control every single month during our regular nets, not just picking the same two or three experienced guys every time. it felt awkward at first because some people really weren't comfortable with it but now we've got maybe 8 or 9 people who can actually step in without things falling apart.

the ICS form stuff is a whole other beast. honestly the best thing we found was just doing tabletop sessions where people practice filling them out, not during an actual radio exercise, just sitting around a table working through sample scenarios. sounds boring but it really does help when the pressure is on. our EC got some laminated quick reference cards made up that people can keep in their go kits, that helped a lot too especially for the newer folks who dont use them regularly enough to just remember the format.

sounds like your group got some good material to work with from that exercise though, the ones that expose problems are always more valuable than the ones where everything goes smooth.

I havent done a full ARES exercise yet (just got my general last spring) but this is kind of making me want to get more involved with our local group. I went to a couple meetings but honestly felt like I didn't have enough experience to be useful in a real activation. reading stuff like this though I'm starting to think maybe just showing up and being a third op at a served agency or something would at least help me learn the ropes before something real happens.

do most groups welcome newer hams into these drills or is it more of a thing where you're expected to already know the procedures?