so i finally participated in a full simulated emergency exercise through our local ARES group and honestly i wasnt prepared for how different it felt compared to just ragchewing or even contesting. the scenario was a simulated multi-day flooding event and we had to establish a net to pass formal traffic between a fake EOC and some shelter sites around the county.

the thing that caught me off guard was how much the formal message handling slowed everything down at first. i've done some winlink stuff before but passing ICS-213s verbally over simplex when the repeater was deliberately taken offline was... humbling. i fumbled a couple message numbers and had to ask for fills way more than i should have. the net control guy was patient but i could tell the pace was painful.

also nobody told me how exhausting just sitting there monitoring for hours is. like mentally exhausting. you cant zone out even for a minute or you miss something. one of the older elmers in the group said this is actually one of the biggest reasons real deployments fail - people just get fatigued and start making copy errors after hour 6 or whatever.

anyway if anyone has done these kinds of exercises before i'd love to hear what tripped you up the first time, or any habits you built to get better at it. feeling a little humbled but also kind of hooked on this aspect of the hobby now.

yeah the fatigue thing is real and i dont think people talk about it enough. i've been doing emcomm stuff for maybe 12 years now and the mental load of sustained net operations is something you genuinely have to train for, not just show up and expect to handle. the message handling piece gets easier with reps but you have to actually practice it regularly, not just once a year at a SET exercise.

one thing that helped me a lot was keeping a paper log even when we had digital backup going. just the act of writing stuff down by hand keeps your brain engaged and gives you something to cross-reference when you think you miscopied something. sounds old fashioned but it works. also rotating operators every two hours if you have the bodies to do it makes a huge difference in accuracy during a long event.

honestly it sounds like you got a lot out of that drill even if it felt rough in the moment. the people who walk away thinking they did great usually learned the least.

i had almost the same experience at my first drill a couple years ago, simplex only with no repeater was a wake up call for sure. i think i spent half the time just figuring out who i could actually reach from my position and who was in a dead spot. we hadnt really mapped out our coverage before the exercise and it showed pretty badly.

after that our group started doing quarterly tabletop sessions just to go over scenarios and talk through what communications plan we'd actually use, before we ever key up. seems boring but it made the next live exercise way smoother. anyway welcome to the rabbit hole, emcomm is a whole different world from casual operating