so we finally did our first full-scale exercise in probably two years, simulated a major flood event cutting off the county EOC from the hospital and two Red Cross shelters. i've been with our ARES group for about six years now and honestly thought we had our stuff together but man, some gaps showed up real fast.

biggest thing that hit us was net control getting overwhelmed within the first twenty minutes. we had maybe fourteen stations trying to check in at once and the guy running NCS — good operator, really is — just got buried. nobody had agreed on a check-in format beforehand so everyone was doing their own thing, some giving full phonetic callsigns, some just rattling off a short call, one guy started reading his position report before NCS even acknowledged him.

the other thing that kinda surprised me was how fast people defaulted to using their phones and texting each other off-net when things got confusing. kind of defeats the whole point you know. we lost two stations from the exercise for like 20 minutes because they were just texting the EC instead of staying on frequency.

anyway im curious if other groups have run into similar stuff and what you've done about it. feels like the check-in procedure thing is fixable but i wonder if theres a better way to structure the net when you have a lot of stations all coming on at once. also wondering if anyone has done tabletop exercises before going full field deployment — might be worth doing that first next time to get everyone on the same page before we go live

yeah the check-in chaos thing is basically universal, every group hits it. what helped our section a lot was running a separate check-in net on a secondary frequency while NCS handles traffic on the primary. kind of like a staging area — you check in with the secondary net manager, they batch you up and pass a consolidated list to NCS every few minutes. takes some coordination to set up but it really smoothed things out for us after a pretty rough exercise a few years back where we had almost the same situation you're describing.

the phone thing is trickier honestly. i think part of it is just muscle memory, people reach for the phone when they're stressed. one thing our EC did was explicitly add a rule to the exercise that any off-net communication counted as a failure for that station, not punitive just tracked. made people think twice. though it also surfaced the real problem which is sometimes the radio path genuinely wasnt working and they had no other option — which is actually useful to know during a drill rather than a real event.

tabletop first is absolutely the move if you havent done one. we do a tabletop every january and then a field exercise in spring. the tabletop is where you find out that half the group hasnt read the ICS forms in two years and someone's repeater coverage assumptions are completely wrong.

this is the kind of post i needed to read today, im fairly new to ARES (just got my general like 8 months ago) and we have an exercise coming up next month and i honestly didnt realize how complicated the net control side of things gets when you have a lot of stations. i kind of assumed it would be more organized than that? going to ask our EC if we can maybe do a short walkthrough of the check-in format before the actual exercise day. also didnt know tabletops were a thing for emcomm, thought that was more of a corporate emergency planning thing. are there resources for how to run one or does your group kind of make it up as you go