so i finally participated in an actual simulated emergency exercise through our local ARES group and honestly it was a lot more eye opening than i expected. we were doing a scenario where a major storm had knocked out the county EOC's primary comms and we had to stand up a packet and voice net simultaneously while also relaying resource requests from shelter sites to the EOC.

what caught me off guard was how fast things broke down when people weren't following net control discipline. like there were a couple of guys who kept jumping in with non-priority traffic and it just gummed up the whole thing. net control did a good job handling it but you could see how in a real event that could get bad fast. also our ICS documentation was kind of a mess - half the people were using different versions of the ICS 213 form and one shelter site was just texting stuff over winlink with no subject line formatting so sorting it out was a pain.

my actual question though - for those of you who've done multiple exercises or real activations, how do you handle your station log when you're also doing winlink traffic? do you log every winlink message separately in your paper log or do you just note the session times and keep the digital record as the primary? feels like double logging but i dont want to miss something that matters for the after action report.

yeah the net discipline thing is SO real. we had the same issue at our county drill a few years back and honestly it comes down to whether your net control has actually practiced saying "please stand by, you're out of turn" firmly enough that people don't feel bad about it. the good NCs I've seen treat it almost like air traffic control - no apologies, just calm and direct. takes practice to get there.

on the logging question, our group settled on this after a lot of back and forth: we keep a running paper log for everything that happens at the station - contacts, traffic passed, equipment issues, anything - and then the winlink logs are supplemental. when you write the AAR you pull from both. the reason we dont rely solely on the digital record is that if your laptop dies mid-exercise you still have the paper trail. we had that happen once, machine locked up and we lost about 40 minutes of message timestamps. lesson learned the hard way.

also sounds like your group needs to get everyone on the same ICS 213 version before the next drill. that's usually a training night agenda item kind of thing but it matters more than people think.

first drill is always the one where you realize how much you didn't know you didn't know, haha. i remember mine being kind of chaotic too and thinking "how does anyone do this for real" but it gets better.

i dont do a ton of winlink stuff personally so take this with a grain of salt, but i think the general advice ive heard is to treat the digital record as your primary for message content and use your station log for timing and operational notes. kind of like how you'd keep a log separate from actual traffic copies back in the old traffic net days. someone with more winlink experience might correct me on that though.