so we finally got our county ARES group to do a proper simulated emergency exercise, not just a net check-in thing but an actual scenario where we pretended the repeater was down and had to move traffic via simplex. we had about 11 operators spread across the county and honestly it was humbling. like i thought i had a decent signal from my qth but turns out i cant hit two of the stations at all on simplex from my hilltop location, which made zero sense to me until someone pointed out there's a ridge I completely forgot about.

the other thing that got us was message handling - we use ICS-213 forms for formal traffic and a couple of the newer folks had never actually filled one out under any kind of pressure. not real pressure obviously but even the simulated urgency made some people freeze up or forget to include the precedence. we ended up having to pause the exercise twice which is fine i guess, better to learn that now.

anyway curious if anyone else has run drills like this and what caught you off guard. we're trying to put together lessons learned before our next one in the fall and i want to make sure we're covering stuff that actually matters in a real event not just the checklist stuff.

yeah the simplex coverage thing bites everyone the first time they actually test it. we did something similar a couple years back and discovered our designated EOC liaison literally could not hit the EOC on any of our planned simplex frequencies. on paper everything looked fine, in practice there was a building in the way. now we do a coverage survey every spring just driving around with an HT and a handheld radio log, takes a few hours but worth it.

the ICS form thing is real too. there's a difference between knowing how to fill out a 213 at your kitchen table and doing it when someone is reading you information over a noisy channel and waiting for you to acknowledge. we started doing tabletop stuff indoors first so people get the muscle memory before we add the radio layer. might be worth trying for your fall drill.

this is making me realize our group hasnt done anything like this in way too long. we do the weekly net but thats it. do you need a formal ARES structure to run drills like this or can a handful of people just kind of organize something informally? im a general class and fairly new to all the emcomm stuff