so our ARES group ran a simulated county-wide flood scenario Saturday and I have to say even after 12 years in this hobby I learned a few things I wasn't expecting to. We had maybe 14 operators spread across the county at simulated shelter locations and a couple net control positions and the whole thing kind of fell apart in ways nobody predicted.

The big one for me was message traffic. We had everybody trained on ICS-213 forms and Winlink and all that but when we actually had to move volume - like real volume, multiple concurrent priority messages - the net control guys got completely overwhelmed just trying to keep track of who had what. Turns out we never actually practiced that part, just the individual pieces. Everyone knew how to send a Winlink message, nobody had really drilled on managing a pile of incoming traffic from 14 stations at once under a simulated time crunch.

Also the backup simplex frequencies we designated were fine on paper but two of the hilltop sites couldnt hear each other without going through a relay and we just sort of assumed line of sight would be okay. It wasnt. Small thing but that kind of assumption can really bite you.

curious if anybody else has run exercises recently and what caught you off guard. always feels like no matter how well you plan one of these the surprise is where the real lesson is

yeah this resonates a lot. we did a similar thing last spring, a hospital evacuation comms drill, and our biggest failure was actually documentation. like everyone was so focused on making contacts and passing traffic that nobody was keeping a proper log and at the debrief the incident commander asked us for a timeline of when certain messages went out and we basically had nothing solid to give him. embarrassing but also super valuable to find out in a drill and not during an actual event.

the simplex coverage assumption thing is real too. we spent like two hours with topo maps before our drill thinking we had it figured out and then on the day found out a particular neighborhood was basically a dead zone nobody had tested. bought a cheap APRS tracker and drove the routes after that, which helped a lot for planning the next one.

what did your group do for the debrief format? we struggled with that, some people got defensive when problems came up and it made it hard to have an honest conversation about what went wrong

im pretty new to ARES (just joined a few months ago) and havent been through a full exercise yet but this thread is making me realize I should probably actually read those ICS forms before I just show up to one and pretend I know what im doing lol. is there a good place to practice Winlink before an actual drill? like is there a practice net or something or do people just kind of wing it the first time