so we finally got around to doing a proper tabletop plus on-air exercise with our county ARES group and honestly it was a real eye opener. the scenario was a major bridge collapse cutting off a chunk of the county from emergency services, and we had to establish comms between a simulated EOC, two shelter sites, and a mobile unit acting as the incident command post.

things that went wrong pretty fast: one of our guys showed up with a handheld that hadnt been charged since the last meeting (six weeks ago), another operator couldnt remember the secondary frequency we'd agreed on because it was only written down in an email nobody printed out, and our simplex fallback completely fell apart because we hadnt actually tested propagation between those two shelter sites before — turns out a hill blocks the signal almost entirely.

the stuff that worked surprisingly well was our net control operator who just kept his cool and ran traffic methodically even when three people were trying to check in at once. also having physical ICS-213 forms ready to go made a huge difference because when we simulated the internet going down a couple guys were totally lost without being able to look stuff up on their phones.

anyway curious if other groups have done similar exercises and what kind of surprises came up for you. we're planning a follow-up drill that actually involves some served agencies and im wondering how much harder that makes the coordination side of things.

yeah the uncharged radio thing happens at basically every drill i've ever been part of, no matter how many times you remind people beforehand. we started doing a quick radio check in the parking lot before exercises even start just to catch that stuff before it becomes a problem during the scenario.

the hill blocking simplex is a big one too — we had almost the exact same discovery a few years back during a windstorm exercise. what we ended up doing was pre-identifying a couple of elevated sites we could put a portable digipeater or a crossband repeater at if we ever needed to actually cover that gap. never had to do it for real thankfully but knowing the plan exists helps. the served agency coordination thing is a whole other level honestly, mostly just a lot of waiting and then suddenly everything at once, kind of like actual emergencies from what i hear.

this is really helpful to read, im still pretty new to ARES and havent been through a full drill yet. quick question — what are ICS-213 forms exactly? i keep seeing that mentioned and i looked it up but im not totally clear on how you actually use them during radio ops. do you fill them out and then read them over the air or what?