so we finally ran our first full-scale simulated emergency exercise with the local ARES group after talking about doing one for like two years. it was a scenario where a major storm had knocked out power across the county and we were supposed to provide backup comms between the EOC, two shelters, and the hospital. about 14 operators total.

honestly it was humbling. i thought i had my go-bag dialed in but realized pretty quick i forgot to pack an extra power cable for the HT and my backup antenna was a tangled mess at the bottom of the bag. small stuff but the kind of thing that bites you when its 2am and youre tired. we also had some confusion about net control protocols - like who exactly was supposed to be running things when the primary net control had to step away. nobody had a clear answer and it took a few minutes to sort out.

the good news is the radio side actually worked pretty well once we got sorted. we were running a mix of HTs and some mobile rigs with magmounts, and the linked repeater system held up fine. we did find that one of the shelter locations had terrible repeater coverage inside the building and the operator there had to go outside to check in, which in a real storm would be a problem worth planning around.

anyone else done exercises like this and run into stuff you didnt expect? curious what lessons other groups have picked up that we might be missing.

yeah the go-bag thing gets everyone the first time. i've been doing these drills for probably 12 years now and i still find something i forgot or something that died sitting in the bag since the last exercise. my thing now is i do a full power-on check of everything maybe two weeks before any exercise, gives me time to fix stuff without panicking.

the net control handoff issue is super common and honestly its one of the hardest things to train for because it doesnt come up in normal nets. what we do now is we designate a primary, a secondary, and we have a brief written protocol card that lives in both their bags. nothing fancy, just a laminated half-sheet with the handoff phrase, logging procedure, and who to call if both are unavailable. sounds overkill but in a real event when people are stressed it helps enormously to have something physical to hand someone.

the building coverage problem is worth mapping out ahead of time if you can. we actually did a walkthrough of our main shelter location with HTs and marked which rooms had coverage on our primary repeater and which didn't. took about an hour and now we have a little sketch posted in the ARES binder at the EOC. not perfect but better than finding out during the exercise or worse an actual event.

this is really interesting to read, i'm fairly new to all this (just got my general a few months ago) and i've been thinking about getting more involved with ARES. the coverage inside buildings thing is something i never would have thought about - makes total sense though. do most groups do these exercises pretty regularly or is it more like a once a year thing? i want to make sure i'm actually useful if something real happens and not just standing around not knowing what to do.